February 2020 Newsletter

Happy February everyone! Below you will find information about upcoming events and notes from our most recent District Committee meeting. Please reply to this letter if there is other information you’d like to see here.

ROUNDTABLE LOCATION CHANGE FOR FEBRUARY – Please join us at this month's Roundtable on Thursday, February 20th, from 6:30-8:30pm at Bethany Christian Church (2868 Carrollton Villa Rica Hwy, Carrollton). This month’s big rock topic is National Media Publications. The Cub Scout breakout will be Vaudeville Night with skits, songs, and cheers, and the Scouts BSA breakout will be the Life to Eagle process.

Current and future Scoutmasters and Assistant Scoutmasters: Register now for our district's only offering of Introduction to Outdoor Leader Skills on March 14-15 at Clinton Nature Preserve: http://bit.ly/2umGcAi

District Committee Meeting Notes #

This month started off with formally voting on this year’s committee members and was followed by committee reports and talking about each area that contributes to our JTE score card. Updated listings for both the District Committee and Commissioners have been added to the end of this month’s newsletter.

Program: Georgia Deakin gave us an update on the upcoming Spring Camporee. This year’s theme is disabilities awareness and most of that merit badge will be able to be earned as part of the event. Activities will include a cooking competition, a knot relay, a four-person tug-of-war, and more. The Camporee will be held out at Clinton Nature Preserve March 27-29 and will be a joint event with the Pickett’s Mill district.

Training: Kyle Taylor let us know that last year we missed earning JTE Gold on the training portion by just two leaders being trained. He also reminded us that Youth Protection Training (YPT) certifications have started expiring for leaders who took the new program when it first came out. YPT is an essential part of being a leader in Scouting and, like all program safety certifications, must be renewed every two years. The latest version of YPT can be accessed on the BSA Learn Center via my.scouting.org to renew today! Additional trainings like Hazardous Weather also fit into the bucket of certifications that are expiring for a significant number of leaders this year.

Communications: Gene Liverman lead a discussion around how we communicate within the district. This included a discussion around having a formal way we distribute information instead of the hodgepodge of methods currently in use. Current thinking is that we want the district website (indianspringsbsa.org) to be the canonical source of info and that we want to use this newsletter as our way of getting the word out. We also discussed revamping our social media presence (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter). More information about that will be shared as soon as we nail down a plan.

Order of the Arrow: Larry Cohran updated us on membership levels within our OA chapter. He also mentioned that elections are happening now and that a lot of units have not yet scheduled elections. Now is the time for all troops, crews, and ships to schedule one.

In addition to the committee updates we discussed ways to get a wider variety of nominations for awards that recognize the service of leaders within our district in 2019 and what to do about rescheduling our District Awards Banquet.

Banquet: The district awards banquet has been rescheduled for March 21st at 5:30pm. It will be held at Villa Rica High School this year.

We need your help! #

As you will see below, many positions on the district committee and within the commissioner corp are currently vacant. We really need your help to fill these positions so that we can effectively serve the district. Please reach out to Helen Albrightson if you are willing to help with anything on the district committee or Thomas Godbold if you are willing to help with Roundtable or unit service. Helen can be reached by email at halbrightson at gmail.com or by phone at (678) 910-3314. Thomas can be reached by email at thomas.godboldisd at gmail.com or by phone at (404) 368-8637. You can also use WhatsApp to text or call Thomas.

District Committee Members for 2020 #

The committee is headed by Helen Albrightson as our District Chair and organized into three groups: membership, finance, and program.

Edited: An org chart used to be here in text form… it turns out I had some things wrong. Please see the main District Committee page here for a current chart.

District Commissioners for 2020 #

Our District Commissioner is Thomas Godbold. Our Commissioner corp is divided into two groups: Roundtable and Unit Service.

• Roundtable Commissioner: vacant
  • Cub Scout Breakout: vacant
  • Scouts BSA Breakout: Kyle Taylor
  • Venturing Breakout: vacant
• Assistant District Commissioner: vacant
  • Unit Commissioners:
    • Kimberly Jones
    • Gene Liverman
    • Kent Lovvorn
    • Alisha Mason
    • Joseph Mason
    • Steve Sommers
    • Stephen Ward