Gearing up for a New Scouting Year
Starting a new scouting year is exciting and challenging. One thing that seems to be extra challenging is gathering contact information for any new families that show up at your kick-off meeting or first few meetings. There are also some standard legal agreements/waivers that are good to have parents sign off on and review. Our parent organization offers a standard registration form but it is not yet updated to reflect our new name. If you could use some new forms with our new name, Outdoor Service Guides, you can download them here.
This form template was created by Melanie Willett, GSM of the 17th Black Bears in Virginia. It has blanks to write in or type in your own group name. The form is designed to make it easy to add information using Adobe Acrobat Reader. You can even just fill in the group information and then print a stack to take to your kick-off meeting. The registration form includes a legal waiver, registration information, medical information, and medical release for if you are allowed as a scout leader to give a scout medication on a camping trip, a Covid-19 waiver, a financial agreement to pay dues, and a photography waiver. You can use the information you gather from these to complete the forms on Registration Dashboard for all of your scouts, if you enter those yourself.
The 17th Black Bears website has a web version of this same form so that parents can complete them online and the group can have a digital record. You can view that here. The online version collects the information and sends it in an email to the group email account. If you would like to know more about how Melanie set that up, feel free to send us an email.
You can also get more forms and information about having a kick-off meeting here. Interest meetings are an important part of building up a group that has had a hard year and lost scouts over the last year. Many of us need to build back up our registration. Hang in there. Have fun with the scouts you have.
You can also review how to get and keep volunteers to help grow your group here.
Have a great year! We are so happy you want to scout with us!
1 Response
[…] best first step toward sharing the work. I like to invite all of our parents and leaders to attend planning meetings for the group. At those events, I have a list of jobs that need to be done, and I ask for […]