[Jon Stratis]

Define student to teacher ratio in the FIRST context... does it have to be teachers filling the role, or do volunteer mentors fit the bill as well? Is there some way to leverage that unique feature of FIRST to help your team fulfill the district's rules, while allowing everyone who wants to participate do so?

Is it possible to structure your team and your meeting times to allow everyone to be a part? Obviously, if you have 60 people on the team, I don't care how big your build space is, you're going to have trouble getting everyone time on the robot. If you organize the team schedule, you could have different subgroups meet at different time (One example would be everyone working on the robot, versus those that aren't, like PR, or animation, or website, etc. Another would be two different groups who need dedicated time working on the robot, when you know you can't physically fit more than a few bodies around the robot, regardless of how big your space is), thus limiting the total number of students present for most meetings, while giving everyone a chance to participate. Alternatively, could you "borrow" a classroom for use as pure meeting space (a normal classroom for the PR team, or a computer lab for the programming team, for example) to get around the size limitations of your room?

Asking specifically here about affirmative action is really opening a can of worms... It's a rather political subject, and a lot of people can be touchy about political subjects. I would highly encourage you and your team to look for creative ways and to engage your district leaders to allow everyone to participate, rather than look for the best way to tell a subset of people that they can't be on the team.

That said, I know that some teams have tryouts, others have an interview process... I'm guessing you'll find just about any way imaginable in FIRST to pick out a team amongst large schools with an absurd amount of students wanting to participate.