Dear parents and carers
We made it! Our first face to face meeting since March went off without a hitch last Tuesday – thank you to Akela, Bagheera and the Cubs for making it a success. It was lovely to see the young people in person again and have an evening of new (socially distant) games, which everyone loved.
This week it’s another Cub bubble (bubble 2) meeting at Jock’s Pitch along with the first session for the Beavers (the older ones) at the hall. Explorers are meeting on Zoom this week and the Scouts return to face to face activities on Friday with all the Scouts meeting, albeit for a shorter session, in two separate groups, again split by age. Thank you so much to all our parents and members for following all the rules we’ve had to put in place so far – we couldn’t have got this far without your ever patient support. Please do keep remembering to check the getting back together safely webpage, visit Parent Portal to sign up for sessions and remembering the Keeping Safe Code for arrival, during and departure at meetings. Don’t forget at the bottom of the getting back together safely webpage is a map which should help you find the places we’re meeting when we’re out and about.
We’ve made a few tiny tweaks based on the feedback from last Tuesday’s Cub meeting. The main one for parents is we’ve adjusted the ‘cut off’ time for signing up for a meeting. Instead of being two days before, we’ve dropped it to just the night before. This is really important for us to know how many young people to expect so we can get the right number of volunteers at each meeting and reduce the number if we don’t need them to help keep everyone that little bit safer. You can make changes to your young person’s attendance right up until the night before, after that we’d really appreciate an email or text if they can’t make it so we’ve got the right ratios. Along with that, some other minor behind the scenes stuff to do with registers has changed, just making sure we are prepared should Test & Trace get in touch, but I hope it’s reassuring to know we are constantly reviewing the measures we have in place. It’s also really important if you think of anything, or something isn’t working for you, to let us know so we can address it. We may or may not make a change, but we are listening!
We’re also excited to tell you that we’re going to be trialling a new feature with Parent Portal / Online Scout Manager in the Scout Section called ‘Chat rooms’. The Scouts discussed it last week during their Zoom meeting and they are keen to use it as a safe way of keeping in touch. It has plenty of functions that we’ll be exploring and the easiest way to describe it is as ‘Facebook’ for Scouts – very secure, safe and GDPR compliant. It doesn’t allow private messaging or share contact details and is very easily monitored by the leadership team. Exactly how we’ll be using it will evolve over time and parents from the section will be involved as well as another way for use to keep in touch in this ever evolving world! It’ll also give us a really good reason to revisit online safety with the Scouts!
I guess we’ll have to wait and see if the announcements to changes in restrictions that were announced today (and likely over the next few days) have any impact on Scouting, but until we’re told differently, we’ll keep on going.
Hope everyone has a great week and all the sections enjoy their return in the various forms.
Take care and best wishes
Craig
Group Scout Leader