Never had one of them to get lost but you would be surprise what mischief they can get into. All in all they were a pretty good bunch of boys. Tough too. Many times we had bad weather during our campouts and I never once heard one complain.<<
My friends always turned to me when their son's troop was going to do something that sounded dumb. I'm an old Eagle Scout (Nixon was the honorary BSA President that signed my card). Once they were going to a glacier summer hike, with shorts and nothing to speak of in the way of equipment...
Once they planned on going on a 50 miler trail hike, and this were not even aware the trail conditions. I wasn't either, but just said "Call the ranger station and find out about the trails." It was rocks, no markings to speak of, and the rangers would "find" two or three lost parties every week during the season.
There was one thing that caught my eye. A scout official, and a boy left in camp. Last I heard scouts implemented a two by two requirement. No groups smaller than two scouts two adults. Period. This did not follow that rule. Any ideas?
DK
That caught my eye too. One and only one boy stays behind with one adult while everyone else goes out hiking, and next thing you know the boy wants to get the h*!! away from this place. And he was apparently in bed when the others left. Maybe I've been reading too many stories of children being assaulted by perverts, but I think that adult needs to be scrutinized and questioned very very thoroughly. It's true the boy had expressed to his father before the trip that he didn't really want to go. But that could have been for the same reason. An adult preparing to molest a child he knows usually does some advance "grooming", and progresses to the ultimate goal incrementally.
Just speculating, but: I wonder if "something" happened during the night, resulting in the boy not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. Since the Scouts DO have a firm policy of prohibiting one adult-one boy alone together, he might have reasonably assumed that staying behind wouldn't mean being left alone with his molestor. When the boy said he wanted to stay behind in bed, this adult might have "volunteered" to stay behind with him -- then the boy found himself alone with the guy and decided to bolt. It would explain the boy not having a real explanation for what he did. If he was really that miserable for reasons he felt free to talk about, wouldn't he have insisted that one of the adults call his dad to come and get him? After all, since the boy is apparently not retarded, he could certainly have anticipated that his dad would have been less annoyed by that, than by having him show up at home have gotten there by hitchhiking.
I'm not trying to convict the adult in question. He may just have been trying to look after a troubled misfit kid, and limit the number of other adults who had to stay behind, and the various adults may have just decided it would be okay to break the rules, thinking that having two of the adults stay behind to look after one cranky boy didn't really make sense. But I do think close scrutiny is warranted to make sure that's the case. Not only did this adult break the rules by being at the campsite alone with the boy, but he also then managed to "lose" the kid -- a little tough to explain with a one-to-one adult-kid ratio. If the adult is innocent of any serious wrongdoing -- which he may well be -- he has only himself to blame for causing suspicion and inviting some close scrutiny, unless the other adults left him alone with the boy over his protests.