District Youth Questions

I went to an interesting meeting today. It was a meeting about the WNY District "Wesleyan Youth". Lots of interesting problems. Like most districts, we aren't following "the discipline" when it comes to district youth. Local churches haven't been electing delagates and so they stopped doing annual conferences. Without a conference, it became nearly impossible to form a district youth cabinet. There have been grumblings that something isn't quite right, especially in regards to the disconnect b/w youth groups with staff leaders and groups with volunteer lay leaders. Here are the key questions:

1) Did churches stop participating in "youth government" because it was ineffective or did it become ineffective because churches stopped participating?
2) Is having a district youth cabinet/conference more work than it is worth?
3) What kind of person should the district youth president be? A senior pastor? A youth pastor? A lay leader?
4) Do churches with full-time youth pastors really need district help?
5) Is it realistic to expect full-time & volunteer youth leaders to be on the same wavelength?

I'm sure there are more and better questions to ask. I'm an outsider in that I have almost no involvment with teen ministry. So here's my uneducated opinion. I think the culture has changed too much to practice the disciplines guidelines. I don't think a youth conference (seperate from the general district conference) is necessary in our district. Nor a district cabinet. If it were my decision, I'd have the District Board appoint a District Youth President and put him in charge of just 2 things:

1) Offering training geared toward volunteer youth workers each year
2) Keeping the lines of communication with youth leaders open

Once the District Youth President does those 2 things well for a couple years, we could start adding other neat things like:

1) A leadership devolopment weekend for teen leaders
2) A district camp
3) Etc.