User:Deadeye30/sandbox

Overview
NYLT is run by youth leaders under adult supervision. The Youth Course Director runs course meetings and events, chairs meetings of the team leaders' meeting, delegates duties to other youth staff, assists the Course Director, models the learning and leadership skills, and recruits participants. Assistant Youth Course Directors assist the YCD, oversee audiovisual support, guide the service team, inspect campsites, and prepare a model campsite. Team Guides coach each day's team leaders and present selected sessions and activities. Adults perform administrative services and ensure guidelines are met including health and safety.

Participants are organized as a generic scouting unit. They are grouped into teams of no more than eight. A staff member, designated as a Team Guide, is assigned to each team to coach and mentor the team leader.

The NYLT program is conducted in a one week program, or it can be split over two weekends. NYLT courses are conducted at local council resident camps which provide the necessary facilities for a week-long course. Courses can range in size from 20 to 180 Scouts, generally forming one to four courses, with two to six teams in each. The content learned at any NYLT course is outlined in the national syllabus. It stipulates that, "Each of the core sessions outlined in the syllabus must be presented, with no additional content sessions" and that "The core sessions must be taught in the order that is laid out in the syllabus and with in the six-day time frame." Some councils nonetheless implement small variations in the material taught and may add in other events or special activities not required in the NYLT outline.

Background
NYLT is the most current incarnation of junior leader training program offered by the Boy Scouts of America. Its origins as a program that teaches leadership skills originated on the Presidio of Monterey at the Army Language School in California. Until the early 1960s, junior leader training focused primarily on Scoutcraft skills and teaching the Patrol Method. Béla H. Bánáthy, a veteran of World War II and a Hungarian refugee, had been national director for youth leadership development for the Hungarian Boy Scout Association. In 1958 he was Training Chairman of the Monterey Bay Area Council and a Hungarian language instructor at the Army Language School on the Monterey Peninsula. That summer he organized an experimental patrol to teach boys leadership skills at the Monterey Bay Area Council's Pico Blanco Scout Reservation. A group of volunteer Scouters formally christened it as the White Stag program in 1959, and through the early 1960s it gradually evolved into a three-phase, multi-year program. After many years of studying and modeling the White Stag program, the Boy Scouts of America in 1974 published the Troop Leadership Development Staff Guide. It was the first junior leadership program to focus on leadership skills, which continue to be the focus of NYLT.

Qualifications
NYLT is a one-time training experience. Youth who attend it must meet specific standards:
 * Be currently registered as a member of Boy Scouting or Venturing.
 * Be First Class rank or higher and at least 13 years old if a Boy Scout.
 * Be a current or prospective youth leader recommended by his unit leader.

The syllabus strongly discourages allowing younger youth to attend the program because their physical and emotional immaturity would lessen the value they would receive from attending the program. Some councils add other requirements:
 * Must have attended long-term Boy Scout camp for a minimum of two years
 * Be a member of a troop whose Scoutmaster has completed the adult Boy Scout Leader Basic Training Course.