[Radical Pi]

I can understand where all this is coming from. While we want to give this experience to as many people as possible, for two years now our team has been faced with the prospect of being forced to set a hard limit on the number of people in the team as we've grown to 60+ students. Luckily, both years the district has been gracious enough to donate the salary for an extra teacher to supervise us, and we haven't had to go through with any cuts.

Our process for handling this kind of thing is to conduct interviews with the new potential members. If we do ever have to perform cuts, the decision will probably be based off of what they could potentially contribute to the team and how much time they could dedicate. I'll admit that saying no to a potential member is an extremely difficult thing to do, but sometimes it simply can't be avoided.

The only "dues" we have for our members is that they participate in fundraisers and demonstrations during the offseason. We also have academic requirements during the season, though those are usually of the form "take half a week to cool off and catch up". We also require that students pay a part of the travel costs for any event they go to, though scholarships are available. Often we also have more students wanting to go to each regional than we can take, and in those cases the final decision is made based on contribution during the build season.

One related question I'd like to pose to the forum: In the recent years the district has been pushing hard for us to improve the diversity of our team (build a 50% boy/girl ratio, recruit more underrepresented minorities, etc.). How do your teams factor that kind of thing in when/if deciding who to turn away from the team?