All -
Emotions are raw right now, especially among those of us in the teaching community. For us teachers - please realize that people involved in
FIRST are genuinely interested and committed to seeing a great education to our students - in and out of the classroom, in and out of North America.
For the non-teachers - please realize that teachers have been knocked back on our heels for decades, we're being programmed by our unions and other entities to take issue with just about everything, and the proverbial camel has had just about enough straws.
As a sports analogy, perhaps it would be better to think of these situations as the referee lockout in the NFL - the refs want to go to work and do a good job, but are severely limited due to forces beyond their control.
Nobody wants to see
FIRST teams suffer, nobody wants to see education suffer, nobody wants to see teachers suffer (except perhaps Ether

). As difficult as it is, let's not turn this into a political discussion - rather than throw things at the presumed sources of the problem, let's go about creating solutions. We're used to working in a 6-week constraint - now we've got 4 months. No problem, right?
A big stumbling block I see in separating from school is losing the tax exemptions afforded to schools. Is there a Canadian equivalent to a 503c?