Introducing the New Ranger Safety

March 31, 2021

The online Ranger Safety you have known and loved for almost a decade has remained unchanged. Sadly, the world has not, and we needed to overhaul Ranger Safety to be current with today’s culture. The safety of the young men within our care during a Royal Rangers meeting or outing is of paramount importance.

The new Ranger Safety course was rolled out on Saturday of LEAD21. It was a combination of live presentations and videos from the course. This was the only “classroom” type presentation of the new Ranger Safety that will be provided. Why only one live classroom presentation? You will need to watch session 1 to get that answer. Now, Ranger Safety will be available online only, tentatively starting April 1, 2021.

The new Ranger Safety online course consists of nine video sessions each followed by a five- or ten-question quiz. The entire course, not including the time to take the quizzes, is only about 80 minutes, which is not a huge investment of time.

As mentioned in our last article, this course is required to be taken every three years. The 3-year renewal allows us to keep our leaders up to date on changes and have them refresh their memories on this vitally important topic. Once a leader completes the online course, the certificate will include an expiration date three years from the completion date.

Next chartering season (starting in August 2021) during the outpost registration process, an additional check box will appear that will require the outpost to indicate that all its leaders are current with the Ranger Safety training.

From April 1 through August 31, 2021, the Ranger Safety course will be 50% off. Thus, the cost will only be $5. Beginning September 1, 2021, the cost will go to the regular price of $10. Note, the new cost is $5 less than the old Ranger Safety course.

You probably noticed that I said the online release date is tentatively April 1. There is a great reason for this. The LEAD21 presentation was met with a great response from our attending leaders. I was pleased to receive several favorable comments on the course. I also received a constructive critique that landed directly on target. That caused a change to the final session. In session 9: The Wrap-Up, National Director Karl Fleig introduces a new concept of “See it, Address it.” The critique led us to alter this concept to “See it, Address it, Share it.” Sound interesting? Watch for a future article in Rangers NOW that will explain this concept or go ahead and take Ranger Safety as soon as it is available. The critique caused us to rewrite some of session 9, which means we have to reshoot this video session. We are currently in process of doing that. At the time of writing this article, with this last-minute improvement, we are not yet sure if we will be ready to release on April 1.

In closing, after the successful launch of the online Ranger Safety course, we will be turning our focus on creating a Spanish version of Ranger Safety complete with chapter 27 of the Royal Rangers Leader Manual and the quizzes translated into Spanish. That is what I call progress.

Mentoring Future Men together/remotely into 2021,

David