If you’ve attended summer camp with your unit, you’ve probably had to help Scouts who couldn’t find their merit badge class sites or had trouble getting from one site to another in time.
The staff at Camp Barstow in Batesburg, S.C., came up with a solution. Camp director Jason Spangler and program director Chris McDuffie implemented a “Barstow Bundle” system.
In this system, Scouts stay half the week at one site, working on multiple merit badges, and then on Wednesday afternoon, they switch and start working on another bundle of badges at another site. There’s no rushing from one side of the camp to the other at the end of each hour — a frequent time-consuming transition.
“We lost so much time in transition,” Spangler says. “We realized there were a lot of merit badges that fit together well. What if you taught them together?”
