Jack Thornton wrote:
The point of the Council contingents, as I understand
it, is to give kids a chance to go to Philmont who
will not otherwise have the chance, because their unit
will not have a contingent they can join.
The council contingent isn't intended to be a troop
contingent.
Philmont will serve the same number of kids regardless
of where the contingent comes from. Council
contingents displace unit contingents. If a unit
truly has that level of interest, it should take its
place in the lottery like the rest of us.
Comment: As has been well-stated earlier and often, the
essential priority is getting as many scouts to Philmont as
possible, by whatever means available. Our council sends an
average of over 200 scouts to Philmont annually, some as
provisional crews, and the rest as unit crews. Our troop has
done the lottery route for years and never landed a spot. We
are more than happy to get there as a unit crew with
the help of our council's excellent High Adventure Committee
pholks (who run their own smaller-scale lottery for their
spots.) Since the interest-to-availability ratio for slots at
Philmont is around 5:1, 4/5 of the scouts that would
like to go to Philmont in any given year, won't, regardless of
the intensity of their interest.
Jim (troop6scoutmaster@comcast.net) wrote:
One suprising factor to me was that the council reservation is
a participant count, not a crew count. As a unit, when you make
your reservation you have some flexibility (from 7 to 12) in the
size of the payments you make and what you are actually committed
to, councils do not. As I understand it, the councils are on the
hook for the number of particiants they reserve ... in our case
not even a number evenly divisible by 12. The actual number of
crews (and ranger impact) is determined later, in our case in the
January - February timeframe.
Comment: As I understand it, in our council's case (others' mileage
may vary) the number of Philmont slots that they request for each
expedition is driven mostly by the capacity of the bus(es) chartered
for the trip from Denver or Colorado Springs to and from Philmont.
>Ched Hudson
ASM Troop 994
Fairfax Station, VA
Philmont '67, '04, '06 (all 3 council-run)
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Received on Thu Nov 17 15:24:31 2005
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