Hello. We are able to record service hours and camping nights for our Scouts and Leaders, however, regular (non-leader) parents do not show up on the Troop Roster on IA and we are not able to record their attendance and miles/hours/nights.
Is it possible to record activities (miles/hours/nights) for regular troop parents that attend events with their Scout? This information is important to us when listing attendees of events in the Court of Honor Program.
Is IA just for recording Scouts and leaders?
Thanks
@Mrs.Myers - if they are not registered then they will not show up in IA nor in my.scouting.org. IA has always been for reporting unit progress and not for non-registered tracking.
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Service hours for non-registered can be recorded. That’s the only category with an entry of recording for non-registered individuals.
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The parents are all registered. Thank you @brantgurga for clarifying. Now we know that we can only record service hours for non-leader parents (not nights or miles).
Further Question:
On the same lines, it looks like when we print an RSVP report in Scoutbook (not IA) on the attendance page, only Scouts and Leaders appear in the report (even though many registered parents were invited to and rsvped and were recorded as having attended). Is that correct?
Am I correct in saying that only Scouts and Leaders will appear on RSVP reports?
Basically what we want to do is create a full printout of all that attended our events (Scouts, Leaders AND all registered parents) so that we can print their names in our Court of Honor Program. As we see it, the RSVP report will only print Scouts and Leaders.
Thank you for all of your help! Much appreciated!
@Mrs.Myers - how are all of the parents registered? What positions?
Apologies. I may have not been using the wrong terminology (my fault).
The parents in questions are all just parents. Parents of Scouts that do not hold a leadership or uniformed leader role. Yes, they have a profile on Scoutbook (so that they can be invited to events and be connected to their Scout) and have done YPT, but no, they are not uniformed leaders, or merit badge counselors or anything like that.
(we used to be on TroopTrack and just moved to SB and TT gave us nice clean lists of anyone that attended or did miles/nights/service hours. This may be something that SB does not do, I am just trying to understand).
Thank you for helping me understand this. I appreciate it.
@Mrs.Myers - then they ARE NOT registered. An adult who is registered has filled out an adult application, completed the Criminal Background Check and had the application approved by the Charter Org and app submitted to council. That is a registered adult. TroopTrack as far as I know does not interface with the official rosters at IA or my.scouting.org. In any case, parents would not be on the selection lists at IA or my.scouting.org unless they are registered adults or lion/tiger adult partners.
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Very helpful. Thank you @Stephen_Hornak!
I apologize for my initial misuse of terminology.
It just seems silly to me that if a (non-registered) parent is allowed to be invited to an event on SB and if they are allowed to RSVP for an event and if we can mark them with a star as having attended an event, then why would they not appear on the print out on the rsvp/attendance?
Final question.
Is it correct to say that SB reports will only reflect Scouts and REGISTERED adults? So when I print out the RSVP report I will only ever be getting Scouts and registered adults (not the non-registered parents that attended) even though other (non-registered) parents attended?
Thanks!
It depends on which reports. There are a variety of reporting options in Scoutbook that are context-specific in terms of who can be included.
For example, the RSVP report that can be created from an individual event shows registered adults, registered youth, and parents/guardians of registered youth in the report. The Roster Builder reports have certain information which can be displayed for registered scouters, registered youth, and parents/guardians of registered youth. The Report Builder will only return information on registered youth, since it’s essentially only advancement and awards-related information. OA Eligibility report (for troops, ships & crews) will only include registered adults and youth.
Note that IA2 is more closely tied to “advancement” than Scoutbook has historically been, and therefore its structure (and associated reporting) tends to be clustered around that functionality. I don’t use IA2 directly (as much), so I’m not quite as familiar with its operations. However, general tracking of all unit-associated (i.e. registered and non-registered persons) has not historically been something that BSA software has done. Thus, I wouldn’t expect to see non-registered persons added to IA2 reporting, at least not with a very high priority (i.e. not until everything else is done, if ever).
As @brantgurga noted, you can include headcount and hours for non-registered persons for service activities, but not for camping and hiking logs. The latter two are typically tracked in logs for purposes of advancement and awards eligibility, neither of which is pertinent to non-registered persons. For the former, all service hours rendered by units are typically tracked, whether provided by registered or unregistered individuals.
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@Mrs.Myers - i am still trying to understand how any of that is germane to a Scout Court of Honor
Often times, since parents attend CoH, I’ve seen parents who assist with events recognized publicly by the CC or others. It’s a great lead-in to saying “…and we’d love to have more of our family members supporting us by doing XYZ,” when soliciting more help for things that don’t have to be done by registered scouters.
This does seem to be a bug. If one were to use the RSVP report to buy food for an activity, we would be missing mouths to feed that followed the RSVP process. Seems like a bug in the report.
I think the OP was saying they run a report and say the troop camped X nights or did Y number of service hours and they want those inclusive of all souls who were there.
They do appear in the RSVP report, though. At least they do when I run it. In fact, the connected parents/guardians appear even if they aren’t invited. They just appear next to their scout’s names.
Interestingly, if you’re both a scouter and a parent, you still appear next to your scout and you show as “not invited”, even though you may be invited as a scouter under the leaders’ list.
@CharleyHamilton - ah… i get that… always the best lead in to bringing parents into the unit as registered leaders. My only thought was jeez… do I want to listen to someone reading off a list of who attended what for 5 hours… then get to the scouts… who are really the focus of a CoH
To answer your question -ScoutBook is only going to track items for the registered individuals. It is looking to the member data base to as an identifier. That is how it knows that ID# is associated with Unit X, Y, Z, etc…
This is one of the draw backs to a program that is developed and maintained for X purpose. Programs like TroopMaster was and is developed for a paying client list. The information in TM is encapsulated for your Unit - so it allows for the addition and collection of other information.
Unregistered parents have a BSA id. So, there’s that. I think your other comments are on point. Scoutbook is used to track items for Scouts. Adult volunteers are a secondary user group. Unregistered parents are a distant third.
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Something else to consider that is also important. If a non registered adult is spending more than 72 hrs (total)/year involved in unit activities be it camping, driving, helping to sell popcorn at a store front, etc., he/she MUST become aregistered adult leader- YPT, background check, recharter fees. I think we can expect this to tighten up even more now that we are beyond the bankruptcy.
I’d be careful with generalizations on policy like this. Different jurisdictions/councils/chartering organizations have widely varying requirements for when an individual has to register as a scouter. For example, I’m not aware of such a policy in my council, although our chartering organization has more restrictive policies than that regarding registration, so it’s possible that it has just never come to my attention.
We can’t talk YPT rules in here. If it continues, this thread will need to be closed. Please ask your council about the rules.
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