Welcome! This forum has a treasure trove of great info – Scouters helping Scouters! Just a heads up, though - all content, information, and opinions shared on this forum are those of the author, not the BSA.
Our council is now requiring units attending camp at their campgrounds to bring a printout of their roster from my.scouting with the names highlighted on it of who from that unit are attending, per the new requirements from the GTSS. No problems there. We understand the rule and have no problems providing that information.
The issue is that when you export the roster to a PDF to bring with you, because there’s so much information, the text is so tiny it’s almost illegible. If there were a way to remove some unnecessary columns so as to make the text larger, it would be a tremendous help. The campmasters are going to need magnifying glasses to read what’s on the paper. And making it print on larger paper doesn’t help (I tried)–all it does is print 8.5 x 11 on 11 x 17 with a lot of white space.
Now that this is going to be the new standard going forward, does anyone know if there will be any improvements coming to being able to print out a legible roster hard copy?
@VincentClose If they just want adults, then what might work better is to go to the Training Manager dashboard, and then click on the YPT “Report” button. Then export that report to pdf.
But you will still need to talk to your council to see if that would be acceptable to them.
@JenniferOlinger - I have to provide this both in our council and the neighboring council. So far the roster report from scoutbook with names and BSA ID have been sufficient.
If the Council is expecting a roster in a specific format, the Council needs to provide the instructions on how to produce it. If they just want names of people attending, you could use the RSVP report from Scoutbook.
Then ask your council HOW they want you to provide the roster. My council only cares about who was present. We can hand them a hand written list of those attending.
No, they want the official roster from my.scouting (neighboring councils are requiring the same thing at their camps, all citing the new requirement from National effective 9/1/2023) with both youth and adults, since this is the official roster that is turned in at check-in at camp.
We are to take the roster (PDF printout only, because an export to CSV could be manipulated) and highlight on the roster who is attending, both youth and adult. This is to replace whatever manual paper forms a camp may have used in the past.
I’m an Assistant Council Commissioner as well as Assistand Scoutmaster, and this came up for discussion in our last council commissioner’s meeting, that while the roster that is generated out of my.scouting is acceptable and required, it’s just that when you print it out the text is so tiny that you can barely read what’s on it.
If it has to be a direct PDF printout of the entire unit roster, I don’t know of any way that columns can be excluded from the printout. It sounds like your council may need to reach out to nationals and open a ticket to make such “filtering” of data columns possible, if this is what they want units to be able to do from the my.scouting roster.
ETA:
Don’t tell the councils that, @edavignon! They’ll want it notarized next… < /sarcasm>
How does your council reconcile the roster to make sure that all adults attending are registered adults? This is why there’s the requirement that the roster has to come from my.scouting and then matched up with who is attending. If an adult is attending (and we’re talking SBSA here, not Cubs) and they’re not on the unit’s roster, they have to leave.
The roster as it is in my.scouting is sufficient to meet this requirement, it’s just that the layout and text size when it is printed out is very, very small.
I will take our printout this weekend to our campout with the names highlighted and let the campmasters figure it out.
@VincentClose - if my council were to get like that I would print the pdf on the large format poster printer, roll it up and hand that to them. I would make it 4’ x15’
If the council wants to verify that, they can cross-check the BSA ID numbers of the adults with the current registration list, irrespective of how the list is generated and formatted. Many camps that require all attending adults to be registered require pre-submittal of a list of adults, which they can then cross-check.
And that was what I pointed out, when registering for a campsite in council or out of council I enter in the roster data in the registration system. Admittedly the out of council camp would not be able to verify this data directly but I am posting it exactly as it exists in MYST. Once I register I just pick from the roster and that builds the attendees list
The same way they verify it for a troop going to a State Park. It is up to the unit leaders to make sure all adults are properly registered.
I bet there is no one at your Council that has the time to cross check every adult against registration lists. Most councils are not getting the work they already have completed in a timely manner.
@VincentClose - my experience with campmasters is one that is not leading me toward the mensa meeting in that camp. I think you are working yourself up unnecessarily and honestly if they cant read the pdf they are asking for then too bad.
