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I have a parent who appears to be able to mark their child’s adventures as Approved.
This parent is not only not a leader, the connections manager doesn’t even show that she has accepted the invitation to link to her own child (the one for whom she is approving adventures).
(Worse, she is going back to prior ranks and marking things complete/approved for years during which he was not a scout… that we can clear up with reeducation of the parent… but…)
How does a parent who is not a leader have the ability to approve adventures??
When COVID started the Cub Scout program office asked that Scoutbook allow parents to approve Cub Scout advancement. I am checking to see if this is still allowed.
The parent should be educated on Cub Scout advancement, that a Cub Scout cannot go back and earn ranks or adventures prior to the rank the Scout joined.
I have confirmed that parents who are not leaders cannot approve Cub Scout advancement any longer.
I looked at the Scout’s record and I do not see anything approved by the Scout’s parent. Did the parent mark the items completed? Parents and Scouts are permitted to mark items complete, the same way they can write in the Scout’s handbook.
If you can find out what she did to approve these, it will help us find the hole in the system. We have looked and cannot figure out how a parent is still able to approve Cub Scout advancement.
I am having the same problem. New Boy Scout. I sent his mom an invite to Scoutbook. His profile does not show that she has linked up yet.
She logged in and somehow marked him as Approved for First Class. She has no idea how this happened. She showed me how she logged in on her phone, but still shows she has not linked to him. Now she somehow has marked him approved for Tenderfoot.
I tried to “uncheck” the box that he is approved but it won’t let me.
I am currently listed as the Committee Chairman for his Troop.
What should I do next?
FYI, @DonovanMcNeil or one of the other mods probably stripped it from your post, but please be aware that the forums are world-readable, so personal info like phone numbers, emails and other contact data could be seen by just about anybody.
Thank you. I wish there was a contact phone number or direct email we could use to get help with Scoutbook. Our local Council office staff repeatedly tells us “we don’t handle any of that, you’ll have to contact Scoutbook.”
There used to be an email process, but with the budget cuts & layoffs at BSA national, that “direct access” went away for volunteers. From experience, it wasn’t necessarily any better, and was typically slower, than working with the SUAC volunteers.
For stuff that can’t be solved by the SUAC volunteers here, they might refer you back to the council to either solve using the council’s Volunteer Support Tools (VST) software or to start a bug report through the council’s tech support process (which does exist, but it seems like many councils are either unaware or have simply told their volunteers/staff to point folks here).
I discovered that although I was not able to “uncheck” the “approved” box, I could click it and it opened a window with the “Date Earned” already entered from the date the parent must have clicked ‘approved’. There was a blank box for ‘awarded’, and below that it said “approved by XXX XXX on 11/13/2022” (that was the Scout’s mom). I then backed out the date earned, left it blank, and clicked Save. That fixed the problem for now, but I’m still concerned that she was approving things without realizing how she did it. Since she had approved an entire rank, I was unable to enter rank requirements we completed at last night’s meeting.
Richard, that is fairly standard that you have to remove the date. Once the date is removed you should be able to remove the check marks as well.
As for how this is all happening I do believe the policy is that parents are supposed to be able to mark requirements completed for Lion through Bear ranks; however, the infamous “BSA Administrator” often automatically marks completed requirements as approved. That auto approval with the BSA Administrator might be where the bug lives.
Scoutbook is not supposed to allow any parents who are not leaders to approve anything. There was a temporary COVID exception that allowed parents to approve Cub Scout advancement in Scoutbook but it has ended.
Yes, Cub Scout parents are permitted to approve Lion through Bear advancement but the change to Scoutbook to permit this was too big of an effort. The BSA decided to leave Scoutbook as it has always been.
