Beaver Scouts

As noted above, we have applied for a permit to use Pauline Johnson PS, but it seems unlikely that we will have use of the school for some time.

Our parents will appreciate that Beaver-age youths need an indoor program space with access to washrooms.

Earlier in the COVID crisis, our leaders put a lot of effort towards making digital meetings work. However the experience has been that our Beaver youth were uninterested in virtual, and parents were not in favour either.

Accordingly, until we secure an indoor venue, we do not have a solution for holding regularly-scheduled Beaver meetings.

We will look for an alternative venue. If you may be able to help to connect us with an indoor meeting space, please contact us.

Cub Scouts

Without a venue for regular indoor meetings, we will need to run most of our program outdoors (or virtual).

We considered the possibility to running outdoor meetings on our regular meeting nights (Wednesday from 7:00-8:30pm), but this is rather impractical, as it will be dark at the start of the meeting for most of the winter term. The best solution we envision is to have outdoor activity meetings on Saturdays.

Our tentative plan is to have outdoor activity meetings on alternating Saturdays from 2:00-4:00pm. Depending on the activity, we may start a little earlier (1:00pm) and/or end a little later (5:00pm). By alternating activity weekends, we have the flexibility to move activities to another date if the weather is not conducive. In the weeks in-between activities, we will host virtual meetings online. These virtual meetings will be a mix of online activities/games (e.g., Kahoot) and preparation/instructions for the upcoming outdoor event. In some instances, we may run an activity during the week (e.g., a Discover Scuba Diving night), depending on interest and availability.

Some of our ideas for activities include:

• A hike at Rouge Valley Park with pizza lunch
• A GPS rally at TreeTop Treking
• A bike ride on the waterfront
• A scuba night
• A winter skills day with evening campfire
• Emergency First Aid certification
• Hiking at nearby provincial parks or conservation areas

One of the largest unknowns we have at the moment is how many youth will be interested in joining our program. We believe that we need 5-7 youth in order to form a group. With this in mind, all youth interested in joining our program should register at MyScouts.ca. If you could additionally email me to let me know that you are joining, I would greatly appreciate it. If you have any difficulties registering, please let me know – this will likely be a minor technical issue that our administrator can fix.

If we do not have enough youth registered to form a group, we will let you know and you can receive a full refund. Scouts Canada allows full refunds within 1 month of registration, so there is no risk to registering.

We hope that we can put together an interesting program that will be as active as it is educational. Now, more than ever, we need to get out there…

With that in mind, I hope to see you out there!

- Baloo.

Scouts and Venturers

As noted above, the school board is not issuing permits for after-hours use of school facilities. This leaves us without an indoor space for weekly meetings. Likewise, the local Scouts Canada camps remain closed for group camping. This results in the cancellation of many of our favourite events and no access to many of the facilities we are accustomed to using for our program.

We fully recognize that Scouting is an outdoors-focussed movement and that we should be able to operate without indoor meeting space. We feel however that a weeknight or weekend afternoon hike in a city park or a bike ride on a marked trail does not constitute a full Scouting program for older youth and is not something for which you need Scouts Canada. You can surely do these activities on your own.

We have tried virtual meetings but after experiencing most of last year’s school online we understand that most of you have had enough of Zoom. Virtual meetings and activities have not worked well for our Scouts.

We are all looking forward to the end of COVID-19 and a return to more normal activities. But this pandemic is not over yet and further loosening of restrictions by the province is unlikely to help. We would prefer that you remain safe and use your in-person activities for school.

We will continue to forward by email information about interesting online Scouting activities that do not require full registration with Scouts Canada.

Until we can offer a full and safe Scouting program we will not be offering in-person Scouts or Venturers. We will continue to assess the situation and will let you know when our position changes.

- John.