Scouting’s Journey to Excellence (JTE) is the BSA aspirational planning, performance and recognition program designed to encourage and reward success of our units, districts, and councils. It is meant to encourage excellence and continuous improvement in providing a quality program at all levels of the BSA.
Many unit leaders have found JTE metrics to be an effective continuous improvement tool. As previously announced, changes were made to 2020 objectives to reflect the impact of COVID 19. For this reason, the unit JTE recognition program will continue, however, the district and council level JTE recognition will be discontinued for 2020 and 2021. JTE at the unit level will continue, and recognition patches will continue to be available for units and their members.
Unit Recognition
Revised unit criteria, due to the pandemic, is available at https://www.scouting.org/awards/journey-to-excellence/unit/2020-scorecards-english/. The criteria intentionally provides units a great deal of latitude due to the significant variability of programming due to local pandemic regulations.
2021 unit scorecards are available at https://www.scouting.org/awards/journey-to-excellence/unit/.
Journey to Excellence for districts and councils represents data which is important to help districts and councils deliver a quality program. A new membership reporting tool is under development to aid districts and councils with key membership data including gender and ethnic diversity. You will soon hear more about this.
Unfortunately, the council and district JTE dashboard (dials) and finish line report require substantial manual compilation and data management each month. With the significant reduction in staff at the BSA national service center, the staff support necessary to keep the dashboard current is simply not available. Consequently, it is necessary to decommission the JTE dashboard and finish line report effective September 18.
We suggest that even if JTE recognition is not available, the JTE standards for districts and councils still represent a vision of good Scouting and can be used in strategic planning.
We will be considering what assessment and/or recognition system will be most helpful to councils and districts for 2022 and beyond. It is very premature to speculate on what that might be. Questions can be directed to jte@scouting.org.
Thank you for all you do for Scouting and for your support of the Journey to Excellence program.
