Scout Parents: Can you give me your opinion?

[mom2scouts]

My son has been diligently working on his Eagle project for two years this week. During that time, five Scouts from our troop have finished their Eagle. The projects have been things like building bat houses and putting them up, building a few benches and installing them somewhere,  making feral cat shelters, building a bridge over a small ravine, or making dog beds for the shelter. These projects all take a few days of actual construction and most of them are funded by the recipient.

My son decided to do a project directly related to his major interest and career goals. The non-profit group gave him a list of projects they needed done and he picked one. As a non-profit, they said they felt it was important that the person doing the project had the responsibility of funding the project. He spent months and months raising money and getting donations of both money and materials worth about $1800. He worked to earn more money for the project. He learned some basic CAD so he could design the project and determine all the supplies needed. He then spent lots of time preparing things in advance for the actual work days and finding people to help. He met with the non-profit several times about some changes. The project has a few tricky things and even the recipient has started saying things like, "This is a new one for us! We've never had an Eagle project this complicated." His Sea Scout leader told him, "I can't believe this project! It you decide to do Quartermaster, I'm going to give you a really easy project and not let you do anything like this!" His project already has almost *800* hours of work and he's not quite finished. He needs maybe one or two more work days.

Here's my question: Would you give him credit on his transcript for something like Project Management? This was suggested to me by an Eagle Scout and a homeschooling parent in our troop. I'm usually of the opinion that homeschoolers shouldn't double dip to add more to the transcript, but this project goes so far beyond what most kids are doing for Eagle projects I feel that he should get more credit for it.  Thoughts?

[Miss Tick]

I agree with your sentiment about not double-dipping, but if a regular credit is about 150 hours, that leaves 650 hours of work for the Eagle Project. Definitely worth finding a way to acknowledge that!

[AEC]

(parent of 1 Eagle scout, with another headed that way).

My first thought was that his scoutmaster/council shouldn't have let it get this out of hand. The benefiting non-profit can sometimes run away with things. e.g. "they said they felt it was important that the person doing the project had the responsibility of funding the project."

There isn't a defined amount of time for an Eagle project (a widely used rule of thumb is 100 hours collectively, but the scouting rules do not state a specific amount of time). Frankly, this seems excessive. Is there really NO intermediate milestone that could be a reasonable 'Eagle portion of the project is done' milestone?

Beyond that, I'd at least breakout some portion and list it separately as a significant amount of volunteer time to the organization.

"He spent months and months raising money and getting donations of both money and materials worth about $1800."

wonder if you couldn't grow that into some kind of 'economics of non-profits' item?

 

 

 

[mom2scouts]

16 hours ago, AEC said:

(parent of 1 Eagle scout, with another headed that way).

My first thought was that his scoutmaster/council shouldn't have let it get this out of hand. The benefiting non-profit can sometimes run away with things. e.g. "they said they felt it was important that the person doing the project had the responsibility of funding the project."

There isn't a defined amount of time for an Eagle project (a widely used rule of thumb is 100 hours collectively, but the scouting rules do not state a specific amount of time). Frankly, this seems excessive. Is there really NO intermediate milestone that could be a reasonable 'Eagle portion of the project is done' milestone?

Beyond that, I'd at least breakout some portion and list it separately as a significant amount of volunteer time to the organization.

"He spent months and months raising money and getting donations of both money and materials worth about $1800."

wonder if you couldn't grow that into some kind of 'economics of non-profits' item?

 

 

 

LOL! His Dad his the Scoutmaster and I don't think he even realized how complex this project was going to get. Council doesn't really even look at the projects until it's done other than to say whether it's allowed or not. If DS can get one more work day, he should be able to finish the construction part. He's going to paint the project too, but DH says he's going to ask the non-profit organization to sign off when the construction part is finished. They will be able to use the project at that point and then DS can just go back later, maybe in the spring, and do the painting as an extra thing.

After reading replies, I don't think I'm going to use it as a credit. The extracurricular resume has short explanations of activities instead of just a list because DS has some unusual activities that need a bit of explanation. I think I'll just put something like "The 800 man-hour Eagle Project consisted of ..." to convey the scope of the project.