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Unread 28-01-2011, 13:11
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SteveGPage SteveGPage is offline
Mentor - Scouting and Strategy
AKA: Steve
FRC #0836 (RoboBees)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Rookie Year: 2004
Location: Hollywood, MD
Posts: 521
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Re: Snow days are killing us

Quote:
Originally Posted by 1075guy View Post

Toronto is also home to the North Americas widest and busiest highway (Our 401 is 16 lanes wide at its widest point through Toronto, ....

... My understanding of why school boards call snow days is an issue of safety. They don't want the kids getting hurt in accidents on the way to school. Show them how you can be safe, and they might change their tune.
That is only when the 401 doesn't shut half of those lanes down for construction!

As to the serious point regarding safety. I have lived in upstate NY, just across Lake Ontario from Toronto, and the snow removal was fast and efficient, due to the shear volume of snow every year. I now live in Southern Maryland where some years we get almost no snow, and other years (like last year) we got several feet of snow during three major storms. We lost 17 days last year because of this. We, too, asked to be allowed in the building and we were rejected by the board each time. Our board is very supportive of our team, but safety is number one. Tragically, this was illustrated a couple of weeks ago. A student at one of our high schools in the county was on her way home, and we started to get a mixture of sleet and freezing rain, and since the county can not quickly treat the surfaces, and she killed in an accident. No amount of asking nicely will ever convince the board to change that policy, no life is worth a couple of extra days in our build season.

Here is how we handled last year's Snowmeggedon - we developed a cooperative program between several teams to set up assistance teams at the Chesapeake Regional - which we called "Operation Snowmeggon". By the end of Friday we had every robot built and running they way they should. If weather continues to impact your area, I would recommend contacting the regional director and work with your regional committee to set up the needed resources at the regional. I have the documentation and the forms we built to allow teams to request assistance. We were referred to as match.com for robots at the regional! PM me if you would like for me to send you that info. You can also go to www.robobees.org and find that info on our website.

Stay safe!

Steve
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