Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

We have in Texas about 1,032 school districts, many of those are very small and these small districts are contiguous with each other and could be combined for a single multi-district FRC teams.

We also have the state divided into 4 FIRST FRC districts that make that initial larger number less daunting. Maybe Texas needs more districts, therefore more RD's?

But, you're right... the initial efforts should start in Dallas/Ft.Worth - Houston - Lubbock - San Antonio/Austin and fan out over the years to cover the whole state.

Maybe there needs to be a cap on the number of FRC teams Texas has capacity for? I wonder what that number is?

However, if there is ever a cap put on the number of teams, I hope the teams are purpose-designed to be dispersed geographically balanced enough around Texas _and_ have team charters that allow for ANY proximate Texan student who is passionate about competition robotics to be able to join.

I don't think in Texas there is even ONE student who can't get access to football, band, or cheer... WHY can't that be the same for competition robotics?

--Michael Blake

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

I love this quote. When I lived in Texas, no one was ever denied the right to participate in XX program or XX sport. A major difference we saw when we moved to Louisiana.

This year so far:
California - 215 Teams - 38,041,430 - 1 team per 176,936 people
Louisiana - 26 Teams - 4,601,893 - 1 team per 176,996 people
Michigan - 235 Teams - 9,883,360 - 1 team per 42,057 people
Minnesota - 155 Teams - 5,379,139 - 1 team per 34,706 people
New York - 139 Teams - 19,570,261 - 1 team per 140,793 people
Texas - 95 Teams - 26,059,203 - 1 team per 274,307 people
Washington - 111 Teams - 6,897,012 - 1 team per 62,135 people

Kind of scary for Texas, considering it should be one of the more active states.

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

I don't have my finger on the pulse of Texas, but it looks like there were multiple grant programs that got too big for their britches and had to scale down, and teams not ready to face that black hole decided to cave in and move on.

A problem I've seen as someone who has never been on a team sustained by a rookie grant or something like that is that like it's been "easy money" as it's been pointed out in the thread. My question is, why have there never been grant programs that have strict requirements that help push teams to make themselves stable and sustainable?

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

Those are some _eye-opening_ stats... THANKS for sharing!

--Michael Blake

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

Hi Meredith!

We don't see much BEST here mixing in with FRC in San Antonio area so I can't help with feedback on that... but maybe Jess can if she has info and can weigh-in?

--Michael

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

Texas will benefit from the reduced cost of districts more than anywhere else I'd guess...

The issue becomes: can we get back the teams we've lost?

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

I don't think there's reduced cost... you'll still need to have minimum $10k-$12k/year to have a sustaining program.

$5,000.00 of that budget still goes to FIRST for registration and the only difference, to my understanding, is 2 competitions instead of one for the $5k.

--Michael Blake

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

Commenting specifically on the registration fees, in some sense they go up. Yes, you do get "two events for the price of one" but the events are smaller in size and don't qualify you to attend Championship.

Regarding schedule, the MAR district event schedule from the one I attended in 2012 as a volunteer looks like this:

Friday: 4pm-11pm Inspection and Practice
Saturday: 8am-8pm Quals
Sunday: 8am-2pm quals, 3-5pm elims, 5-7pm awards, packup,etc

According to MAR's website, they did something similar in 2013.

However, winning such an event (or accumulating sufficient points in the District) qualifies you for the District Championship, which has an additional $4000 registration fee and which you may qualify for the week before the event. Then, if you win certain awards or accumulate sufficient points at the District Championship, your ticket is punched to St. Louis, you pay an additional $5000 registration fee to go to the big show.

So, your total registration fee to have a chance at qualifying for St. Louis goes up to $9000, which is the equivalent of a 2-regional season. However, you get +50% or so total matches before Championship compared to a 2-regional regular season.

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

Jeffrey... EVERYTHING you're saying here is legit and helpful info...

But I think the increase only applies to teams who don't traditionally do 2 or more regionals per season. In our case there's no increase in cost with the district model and like you said we're going to be +50% more matches for the same $9,000.00 spend pre-St. Louis Championship. < assumption that the 2 qualifiers are local to San Antonio >

It would be interesting to see what the number of teams will be capped at for the Texas State Championship? And also the number of teams in Texas that do 2 or more regionals presently?

I think the teams that presently do 2 or more regionals (as long as they avoid aluminum gears and helix's... lol) will pretty much dominate the ranks of the teams qualifying for state championship the first couple of years... anybody disagree?

--Michael Blake

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

This is true, also teams don't have to attend the State Championship if they don't want too. If some teams only have enough money for the initial registration fee then they still get more matches with the district system and the possibility of attending the State Championship if they qualify and they fundraise or find a funding source.

I would hope Texas would be able to find funding for teams that qualify for the State Championship and for World Championship just like Michigan has now. (If TWC is lowering their support, this may be a challenge.)

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

I don't have any of those numbers off-hand (and know that it hasn't been a problem in the Austin area either), but I'll see what I can do about tracking down such stats! My suspicion is that BEST isn't the main reason we're seeing large attrition of Texas. Like I voiced before, too, I think we’ll be closer to expected numbers within the next month or slow as our historically slow Texas teams start registering.

I like a lot of your suggestions. I hope my comments below are not perceived as flaming! Let me see if I can address some of them with what I know as a Texas Assistant RD. I'm not at all involved with money and fundraising, but I have some knowledge about what goes on with it and I do work with teams.

1. Superintendents can be a great resource. Sometimes contacting them works, sometimes it doesn’t. They have different priorities. As of right now, I’m certain most teams (within Texas ISDs) allow other students from schools within their district to join their teams, which is great. It just needs to be better publicized. It’s homeschoolers and non-district kids who are often not allowed to join those teams due to liability issues. And we don’t want to exclude those kids either! Texas has definitely benefited from the involvement of many wonderful non-school teams (Girl Scout, Boy Scouts, etc.). I’m not certain if your thoughts exclude them from getting access to funding or not, but I would hope that isn’t the case. I’m not sure why they couldn’t become financially sustainable after 4 years of initial support as well.

2. One key issue to making sure new teams develop and grow is having an adult, typically a teacher, who is committed to supporting a team. You all know how time consuming FIRST can be. And sadly, many people are not willing to sacrifice their time despite that it’s so worthwhile. It’s a roadblock we often encounter, but it’s one we are actively trying to work around. Inviting teachers, principals, superintendents, etc. to competitions is a method of hooking them that we’ve used, among others.

2 (continued). Michael, can you elaborate a bit more on “Those RD's should offer to do themselves and/or supply with others the necessary manpower for the first 2 seasons to get the FRC team formed and established.” I may or may not be misinterpreting that. I’d like to hear more about your thoughts on the RDs supplying necessary manpower. We definitely try to connect mentors to teams (I work a lot with NI to get Austin area teams connected). Actually, it’s one of my favorite things to do! ☺

3. We absolutely wish we could do that! Right now, the money just isn’t there. The four Texas Regionals cost a sum of ~$500,000. Patrick Felty (Alamo), Lucia Sevcik (Lone Star), and John Shellene (Dallas/Lubbock) and their Executive Advisory Boards spend many many months raising that kind of money. It’s difficult. When we eventually move to districts, events will each individually cost a lot less money to run, but there will be a lot more events. In the end, if the Texas RDs are raising the kind of money they are now, there will hopefully be more money available to go to teams. In addition, FIRST in Texas, soon will be working to bring in more funds by applying for additional grants (not just the Texas Workforce Commission grant). That’s very exciting. Hopefully in the not so distant future we may be able to give teams a greater financial boost during the years where figuring out how to be sustainable is so key.

Well, we have 3 RDs right now (Lubbock is presently overseen by our Dallas RD until a Lubbock one is hired). All the Texans on here should definitely appreciate the fact that Texas is a HUGE state. Supporting teams across that wide expanse is pretty difficult. We really do need more support throughout the state to help with sustainability and growth.

Let’s talk data:
As far as team growth in our largest Texas cities goes, here's hopefully a reasonable comparison. We’ll consider another large state - California - that is having far greater success with team numbers as a state as a whole. They're at around ~215 teams for 2014 compared to ~97 teams in Texas.

Now, California’s population of over 38 million people far dominates Texas’ population of over 26 million people. Texas, the 2nd largest state in the union at 268,580 some square miles dominates California by over 100,000 sq mi (they’re at 163,695 sq mi). Our population density here in Texas is at just over 98 people per sq mil compared to California’s 244 people per sq mi. Taking all that into consideration, we can see that we (FIRST staff, teams, mentors, volunteers, etc.) face a greater challenge of being able to physically support potential teams across the state because people (and businesses) are distributed much more thinly. Certainly reasonable to feel that city growth is a better focus.

So let’s consider focusing on cities. If we break the number of teams down into cities, things start actually appearing a bit similar (at least in some examples) to California. Let's consider San Antonio and San Diego.

San Antonio is currently ranked the 7th largest city (~1,382,951 people). San Diego is currently ranked the 8th largest city (~1,338,348 people).

NUMBER OF FRC TEAMS:
San Antonio: 11 (missing 7 from 2013, we’re working to get them back)
San Diego: 16

NUMBER OF HIGH SCHOOLS:
San Antonio: ~110
San Diego: ~125

If we’re able to get a handful of those San Antonio teams back for the 2014 season, we’re basically on par with a city of similar population size (although San Antonio has a population density of 3000 per sq mi while San Diego has a population density of 4000 per sq mi). Now, this is perhaps not the case across the board with all major Texas cities, but it does highlight one area where we’re actually not that far off!

One of the worries of many teams (and RDs) in big cities is that there isn’t as much corporate money to go around as is needed. FIRST isn’t the only program corporations support and many of the big corporations already support at some level or another (FRC, FTC, or FLL competitions and teams). Adding more teams to the mix creates greater competition for what funds are available in the region. At some point, it isn’t entirely sustainable. Your suggestion of schools in ISDs combining to form teams might help with dealing with that type of growth and financial need.

This would be wonderful! It takes time though. High School football got its start in the late 19th century (over 100 years ago!). Initially, it wasn't at every high school. In fact, high school and college teams used to play each other back then (one reason being team numbers and density). FIRST and high school robotics in general are still very young in comparison (just over 20 years old!). With more time and effort and greater emphasis, I'm certain it will become a reality. We all as enthusiastic supporters of these programs are working to make it a reality. It takes time, money, and a lot of really good people to make it happen. ☺

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

Well if you take a look at Houston, there is definitely a distinction in where corporations donate money. For example, BP only supports teams near the Katy area, Anadarko only supports The Woodlands area, Johnson Space Center only supports Clear Creek, and so on. Plus there are many corporations and manufacturers that are currently not involved with FIRST Robotics. However, I do agree that any increase in teams will create a competition for funds.

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

BP approached our high school in 2000-2001 and asked to create a robotics team as outreach, it's not that they began sponsoring us and only Katy teams in the area, they've been there since the beginning.

Likewise, I only know of one team in the Woodlands, 1477, and only one team in Clear Creek ISD, 118.

Yes, there is competition for funding as the number of teams increase, but the areas mentioned only had/have one team at the time they began sponsoring them.

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

Thanks for the clarification. Interesting fact I didn't know about 624.

Re: Texas Registration 2014
 

We have an acquaintance who has worked in the fundraising departments of many of the Houston arts organizations (opera, symphony etc.) and she said that they are having trouble because many of the major corporations are now directing their donations toward the massive Medical Center facilities.

It may be more fruitful to direct fundraising efforts towards the many medium-sized companies in the Houston area. It will take some work to find them but one might then have less competition. Many of them are likely to be making decent profits serving the oil and gas industry. The profit margins are much better here than in other industries. The owner of one such company provides funding, a build space and mentorship for one of the Houston area teams.