Good evening,
Many thanks to all of you who joined us this week for our summer Court of Honor at Scottsdale Worship Center. Congratulations to those awarded advancements or badges in advance of summer camp.  It was an added bonus for all of us to sample the many culinary treats brought by the attendees at the evening’s conclusion. For those of you still working on your next rank, keep up the good work! We will have an opportunity during the week of 7/20-28 in Colorado Springs to work on scout skills and/or complete additional boards of review. Our next Court of Honor will be in the early fall to award summer advancements, and the many merit badges which will be earned at camp.
As we prepare for school’s start in the next couple of months, we are reaching the other key time of year when we have new scouts join us. Our primary recruitment focus is in the spring when Webelos cub scouts finish their Arrow of Light and bridge over to Boy Scouts. But we have also had a traditional pipeline of new scouts join us in the early fall, usually through individual recruitment. An excellent way to make your own scouting experience even more fun is to do it with people you like, so if you’ve been thinking of inviting a good friend of yours to join you in scouting, there is no time like the back-to-school timeframe. You don’t have to have been a cub scout to join Boy Scouts – so just go ahead and ask, and then bring them along to try out a meeting or an outing. It is looking like we will already be having three new scouts join us in August, so the more the merrier! We’ll have a whole new set of roles for our boy leadership after the late summer Patrol Leaders Council retreat, so having a number of new scouts to train in basic scout skills would make for great leadership development opportunities for existing scouts, too!
We are less than a month away from summer camp. All attendees have received an initial status update (merit badge confirmation, prereqs, funding requirements, etc.) email from Mr. Benyi, and will also be receiving additional logistical information within the next few weeks. We will continue to meet weekly on Tuesday nights up until the week of camp, and then will of course not meet in Phoenix on the night of 7/23. This coming Tuesday at 7PM the scouts will finish up their theme for June, which has been Wilderness Survival Skills. The boys have planned a creative patrol contest combining the various skills reviewed earlier in the month – come support your patrol-mates in showing how it is done.
See you at the troop meeting!
Mr. Cole