Ok, so here's an update on the situation... My mom and I did some digging and we found a state law that says that a student must attend 120 hours of a year class and 60 of a semester class to receive credit. Our school is set up with "blocks" of 90 min each, 4 blocks in a day. With 180 days in the school year, 90 are spent in a semester class, so 90 days times 1.5 hours equals 135 hours built into the system. Take 135 minus 120 and you get 15 hours you can miss before you "fail" a class, or by our school's system, 10 blocks of that class. For semester classes the math adds up to 5 blocks missed for that class. This wonderful law was provided for us by the "head guy" I spoke of in my original post. Now, with that new rule, we represented our case to the principal. (Just for reference, our school's rule is 7 blocks missed for a year and 3 for a semester class, so this gave us 2-3 extra blocks to work with) The days from robotics are still not excused, however, this brings my blocks to make up from 40 down to 21, a much easier number to achieve. Even better news, he is allowing us to use classes where we are excused from for seat time, for instance I recovered 3 blocks today and have brought my needed time down to 18. And the best news of all, the "head guy" has agreed to pay for any of the after school attendance retrieval sessions that we attend to, up to the number of blocks we missed from robotics. There are 4 sessions next week, from 3:30 to 6:30, so 2 blocks a session. Each block is $10 so he's willing to pay $80 for each of the students on our team that needs the attendance. Now I'm not going to be greedy and attend those alone just to make him pay, I'm using my regular school time as much as possible to make up. After all, he gave us the loophole in the school system that is allowing the three seniors to walk
Now to answer some questions I saw:
Yes a few of our members were once a part of a team under a school district. However, we left the team(s) (there were two) because the school district made it nearly impossible to do anything outside of build season. So no recruitment, no chairman's, no community involvement, nothing. The second of the two teams folded because the head teacher of the team was arrested for drugs and the head district leader of the team was hospitalized because of a brain tumor. Not a good year for that team. We started this rookie team as a part of 4H so we could be away from the school districts and all their red tape. Because we were able to do the work we wanted to do, we pulled off a rookie all star at Peachtree and went to nationals as a result. This just shows how much of a pain the school district is being, we were successful with our methods and yet we are being punished for it.
Here's another, our parents did all send in a permission slip for the school about the trip before we went on it. It was approved by the school before we went, but when we got back it was taken back.
The reason our team was suddenly not approved was because we are 4H and not the school district team, but like I said, this team was formed to be apart of the school district so we could run a team like it should be, year-round.
Here's a comment about the plan to hold our own graduation ceremony, it would be really fun and would make a point, however it wouldn't give us our authentic diplomas and would be little more than a showcase.
Well there seems to be just enough time left in the year to fix everything, sadly I won't be done with school until right up to the day we graduate, but at least now it looks like the three of us will walk. Any more input on the situation would be great, I love hearing how other teams sort out these types of issues.