Trail Talk – 3/23/26
Good afternoon! What a crazy scouting weekend this weekend! We had a ton of fun at Allegan Event on Saturday afternoon! That is really a neat place! We then had a busy Sunday with Riley’s Eagle Project in the morning followed by the Pictured Rocks Meeting in the afternoon. From what I have been told, Riley’s project went very well. The Pictured Rocks meeting was fun, well, fun for me anyway. A lot of you look tired out! 😊
EXCITING NEWS! – I want to share with all of you some exciting news. As you are aware,our Yellow Trailer needs some repairs. Last week I got a pretty solid estimate of the cost of those repairs and within a short time, due to the generosity of people connected with Troop 244, we have enough money donated to cover the cost of the repairs to the yellow trailer AND what we know needs to be fixed on the red trailer right now! I want to send out a huge thank you to the Eagle Scout MOM, the Troop 244 EAGLE SCOUT and to the Beightler Squires Charitable Trust for donating all the money we need to get the trailer fixed! It is truly a blessing to be amongst such a generous community! The hope at this point now is that the yellow trailer should be ready to go by the time the Springfield trip rolls around!
APRIL SPRINGFIELD LINCOLN PILGRIMMAGE CAMPOUT – The Regular announcement for this campout is below but I really want to stress signing up for this campout to everyone! While I am on spring break, I am going to work on making sure we are all properly registered with the Abraham Lincoln Council for this event. That means inputting who is going and what activity you are doing into their system! This lets them know how many are going to the museum and how many are doing the hike. It also helps them to properly get the right patches and such ready. I am also going to work on a menu and transportation. I will have time over spring break to do this so I could really use YOUR help by having you sign up TOMORROW night at our Troop meeting!
URGENT! IMPORTANT!! PLEASE READ! PLEASE ACT!!
- T21 Announcement for Tuesday Night!
- Spring Break
- ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY!
- April Campout, Springfield Signup!
- SUMMER CAMP 2026!!
IMPORTANT NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR THIS WEEK:
T-2-1 SCOUTS!! – ALL T21 scouts, boys and girls, that are working on their Tenderfoot, Second Class and First-Class ranks will be going OUTSIDE at this Tuesday’s troop meeting. You will be working on Fire Building. This includes the Second-Class Fire Building requirements and the Fire’m’Chit award. Please make sure you DRESS APPROPRIATELY for going outside! That means wearing warm clothes and a COAT! Ladies, since you will be working with fire, please wear a HAIR TIE! All Scouts, make sure you wear close-toed and warm SHOES!!
NO TROOP MEETING – We will NOT have a troop meeting on Tuesday, March 31 due to spring break! That is NEXT WEEK! Please do not come to the church that night because no one will be there! We will resume meetings on April 7th with our SUMMER CAMP meeting night!
ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY – April 11th at the car wash next to the Speedway gas station on the south side of Schoolcraft at 9:00 a.m. Sean Harrigan will be the leader in charge. To get this done quickly and efficiently though, we need scouts to show up. This typically only takes about 3 hours if we have enough scouts. This counts as service hours towards your rank advancements! Please wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Boots and hats. Bring gloves and a water bottle. We need everyone to attend. We DO need ADULT help to drive and escort the scouts for safety reasons. If we don’t have enough help, it may take longer than 3 hours and spill over into the afternoon! We need to make sure that we are able to clean both sides of the highway! The spring cleanup is usually the messiest of the cleanups after not cleaning all winter long! PLEASE, PLEASE come out and help on Saturday, April 11th! If there is inclement weather, then Saturday, April 18th will be the makeup day. The State of Michigan MDOT only gives us a 1-week window to do our cleanup. We need to make sure we do it if we want to continue to be of service to our community!
APRIL CAMPOUT – SPRINGFIELD, IL LINCOLN PILGRIMMAGE – The cost for this campout is going to be $60 as of right now per scout and $30 per adult. This campout takes place on April 24 – 26th and scouts will have to get out of school EARLY on Friday, April 24th. Because Springfield is a 5-hour drive, we leave around 1:00 p.m. in the afternoon in order to make it down there in a timely manner. This campout gives you a chance to learn a lot about our 16th President Abraham Lincoln. You have 2 options for activities you can do. 1. You can walk 18.9 miles in the steps of Abraham Lincoln from New Salem, IL to Springfield, IL through suburbs, farmland and other streets taking about 7 – 8 hours to do this. OR 2. You can visit the Presidential Museum in Springfield, IL in the morning and the village of New Salem as it was back in Abraham Lincoln’s day in the afternoon! Both are exciting opportunities. I have done the long hike 13 times and the museum 2 times! I loved both of them! This trip however has A LOT OF PREPLANNING that has to go into it. Permission slip is also attached.
SUMMER CAMP 2026 June 21 – 27th, 2026 PIONEER SCOUT RESERVATION! We are looking at the cost this year of $450/scout and $210/adult. I attended a Summer Camp webinar kickoff meeting the week before last and it made me get really pumped up for Summer Camp. It sounds like Pioneer is up to its usual which means an AWESOME week of camp! It is time that we all started thinking about it NOW. It is only 3 months away! Those 3 months are going to fly by! What can parents do NOW? They can sign their scouts up and start making payments. We need to have payments submitted to Pioneer by April 26th. What can scouts start doing now? Start thinking about your merit badges and what you want to take. We will have a Summer Camp Meeting in place of our normal troop meeting AFTER spring break, on April 7th! You will choose your merit badges at this meeting. We have to submit merit badges by April 26th to Pioneer). Please remember that every scout that goes to camp must have an updated Scouting America Physical form. The physical forms are only good for 1 year. So, start thinking about this now and get your scout their physical form filled out Parts A, B1, B2 AND C. Adults attending camps or high adventures are required to have medical forms filled out as well!
P.R.A.Y. Program (Programs of Religious Activities with Youth) as a pathway for Scouts to earn the (Protestant) Religious Emblem of Faith Award. This program is designed to help young people explore and or deepen their faith while connecting it to the values and experiences they gain through Scouting.
The P.R.A.Y. curriculum provides age-appropriate programs that encourage Scouts to explore their relationship with God, their church, their family, and their community. Through guided lessons, service, and discussions with mentors and church leaders, participants have the opportunity to grow both spiritually and personally.
WILDERNESS FIRST AID TRAINING –For those of you that expressed interest, we will be holding it on May 2nd/3rd at Chris Brake’s house: 2723 Vanderbilt Ave. Portage, MI 49024. The cost for the course is $80. We will start at 8:00 am each day.
Meat Stick Fundraiser – MEAT STICKS! MEAT STICKS! Pick up your meat sticks to take out and sell at the troop meeting. This year, in order to get most out of the fundraiser, we are selling the meat sticks at a price of 2 for $3 instead of $1 apiece. This helps us to make more money overall for each scout’s individual scout account. You can see Brandon Beery at the troop meetings to get meat sticks to sell and to turn in the money from your sales!
Scouting America PHYSICAL FORMS! – Every Scout and Leader that goes to summer camp, Swampbase, Pictured Rocks or the mini-high adventure MUST have an up-to-date SCOUT PHYSICAL FORM with all parts of the form filled out, Part A, B1, B2 and C. You must get a new one for this year. No Form, No Trip. WE NEED ALL PHYSICAL FORMS TURNED IN BY MAY 1ST.
Pictured Rocks Backpacking Trip – The trip itself is July 9 – 15th Cost is $300 due by June 15th. We had a great meeting for this trip yesterday! Remember what I said about preparation! PREPARE! PREPARE! PREPARE! If you have questions about anything, please feel free to talk to me!
SWAMPBASE – Please stay up to date on all information for this trip. Mike King held an information meeting two weeks ago and also sent the information out over email to the group going to SwampBase. Make sure you consult all of that, so you keep up with what is going on! ALSO, EVERY SWAMPBASE participant will need to have a Scouting American Physical Form filled out in order to participate. This includes ALL parts, Part A, B1, B2 and C. Make sure you take care of this sooner rather than later! Please continue to look for information from your trip leader, Mike King!
Troop 244 Payment Portal – Zeffy. Our Zeffy page remains open for you to make payments or by troop merch! Wanna pay for the campout, Pictured Rocks, SwampBase, Registration, etc. Go to the following link: http://bit.ly/pay244
For troop Swag/Merch you can click on this link: http://bit.ly/244swag
Scoutmaster Minute – This week I want to tell you all about something that happened with me last week. This was between a student, guardian and myself at my school. So, last week was Parent Teacher Conferences for my school. I spent quite a bit of the week meeting with parents or guardians and discussing students. There was one conference in particular that was interesting. On Thursday, I met with the guardian of a student, and the student happened to also be there. I reported on how the student was doing in our math class and unfortunately my report was not a good one but was not surprising to the guardian. The student was failing the course at the moment due to a lot of missing work, assignments and tests. The conference went fine and it wasn’t so much the conference as what happened after the conference. About 20 minutes after the conference ended, I received an email from the student. To summarize the student basically told me that she was “done” with math. She felt like she was doing 11th grade math(she is in 8th grade) and that was just done and she signed off by saying “thank you, toodles”. Now, you can imagine that my reaction to this email was not a good one as a teacher. A student basically telling me that she was quitting. As I have mentioned to you, I am working really hard on not being “reactive” and so I waited to respond to this student. The only action I took was to forward the email to her guardian and to text the guardian to let her know about it. I waited 24 hours before I responded to this student and it is really my response I want to share with you. My response went a little something like this:
“You have 2 teachers in this class to help you out. You won’t find that in many schools in our state. Both of us very much want to help you be successful. You are not the first student to feel this way, and you certainly won’t be the last, so your feelings are something that we are very familiar with. I want to encourage you to not give up. Facing tough things is a part of life, unfortunately, and how we deal with those things says a lot about the person we are and the person we will become. You can either choose to be a “quitter” or you can choose to be someone who perseveres and pushes through when things get tough. The person that perseveres is going to the one who has a much more successful and positive life. It is completely up to you what you choose to do. You can either choose to be “done” or you can choose to persevere. If you choose to persevere, please know that we are here to help you. We care about your success. You might give up on yourself, which is what you are doing when you say you are “done”, but we will not give up on you! We are here to help!”
I hope that all of you realize the same thing that I was trying to tell this student. How you choose to respond to a situation says a lot about the person you are and how you will go about your life. Sometimes, there is no choice but to stop doing something. However, in a lot of situations you can choose to give up, or you can choose to continue. Whatever you choose, you need to know that you have people in your corner! You may give up on yourself but your parents, your friends, your family and your scout leaders will NOT give up on you!
“What Troop Does More!!” – 244!!!