Teachers in our school are interested enough in FIRST that they give a lot of their time to our team. In fact, some days more than they work at school! But since this is extracurricular, the school has no good reason to pay the participating teachers... which kinda sucks.

that really pisses me off....seriously, they support sports, which almost no one will have a future in, and then they don't support an excellent activity like FIRST where one can learn many skills. I mean, even if you are the next Mike Jordan, its retarded to think that you can make a living doing that forever b/c its so easy to get injured and only the absolute best ever get anywhere(moneywise) with it. I'm not saying nothing good comes out of sports; a healthy body and boosted confidence can easily be good products of it. But in FIRST practically everyone can get a skill that will benifit themselves sometime in the future. Our society is so focused on violent competition, its just inane. Thats why Im pissed that sports coaches get pay raises but not FIRST mentors.

I know what you mean. Our JPL engineers are working 16 hour days on the 2003 launch mars rover and helping us a lot with FIRST Robotics. All they get paid is their normal salary. They are not given any time off work nor any additional pay for helping us out.

Oh, and as for school support, we get a math teacher who volunteers his help, $2500 to help pay for expenses, a work room, and tools.

Sports
 

I agree totally with Chris, and that is about what brought me on to picking this as a speech topic. At our school, all the sports are given so much recognition, like their own little part of the morning annoucements. The sports are good and all for those kids who play them, it is good to know that there is something that you are good at and all that jazz. But i just want people to know that our team exists, if not support it. We are given half an hour off fridays quite frequently to go to all these pep-sessions, like the one we just had for the game against our rival football team. I have always wondered where is the robotics pep-session, because we should be recognized too. How many of those sports teams have been to "Nationals?"

Yeah, he needs more money, he spent all he had on his corvette. ;)