[daniel_dsouza]

Wow, compared to most of the teams here, I think we are pretty lucky.

Space:
Team 2134 is mainly student run, but we do have a teacher who is "in charge". As a teacher, he teaches the drafting, tech, autotech, and engineering classes. He is still pretty new to everything FIRST, so we are learning together. Becuase he is involved in all these classes, we have a moderately powerful computer lab (used for programming and CAD), a small machine shop (mainly for woodworking, but some metal working machines), and a storage closet (tools and robot materials) at our our disposal. Everything is indoors and connected to each other, which is a huge plus. However, we share everything with our school so we are expected to completely clean up, and share our storage space with really old computers.

Financial:
As of now, we don't receive any direct support (like a friendly $5k for registration) from our school, but we are hoping to change that. We recently changed principals, and I intend to ask him where he stands about FIRST (read our team). While we don't receive any direct support, our main mentor/teacher mentioned above works wonders with the ruling class (read district office) and managed to score a milling machine, lathe, and small 3D printer! All of our finances are managed through a club account, which is very cumbersome to use (see other threads for what I mean). We get about 20% of our finances from outside sources, 70% from club dues and tax credit, and 10% from fundraisers.

School response:
Since our rookie season in 2007, our team has had about 10-20 members. The majority are freshmen who don't have a reputation/social life/AP classes to worry about. We usually start with 30, but just like in Sparta the build season weeds out the "weak". If you ask any non-robotics student at my school, there is a 98% chance that they not know that there is a robotics club at our school, let alone the purpose of FIRST. Most of the students that attend our fundraisers are either from our team, or college alumni. This is mainly our fault as our team doesn't want to demonstrate at our school assemblies (our robot is so beat up, that our club officers are ashamed to show it off.), and that we don't have a presence at school events (save for the freshmen orientation, the reason for our high ratio of freshmen to upperclassmen).
Some of my teachers show an interest in FIRST(chemistry, math), but we still have to ask them if they could help out.
I don't think our administration knows we exist...yet.

Our companion school (our team consists of two high schools) seems to have the situation the other way around. They have very little workable space, almost a negative financial response from their school, but a great response from their student body.

I wish you luck...and hope to see you compete next year.
Daniel D.