Quote:
Originally Posted by tsaksa
Very true. I think the long term effect on teams will be important to watch. Districts are much more expensive for many teams than the regional model, and I see several teams coming out of this season completely broke. It was a good year competitively, but it is too soon to say if that will be a good thing for the PNW in the long run.
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I would not say that Districts are much more expensive for many teams. It certainly was more expensive for a number of teams particularly those from rural areas where there was not a District event near them and even more so for those teams that had traditionally only attended a single a Regional and then made it so DCMP. However in the long term there are plans to mitigate those effects.
In WA for those teams at a public school who took the time to apply for the OSPI grant that would have to travel to one or both of their district events they were given an additional travel stipend that was based on whether they were going to have to travel to one or two district events. I know that did not help teams based in OR.
One of the things that was discussed but was not implemented due to the fact that so much was going on was to encourage teams that lived near a District event to host teams that were traveling to the event. In fact I had one of the rookie teams that was attending an event at the next closest school contact me to put him in contact with another rookie team that was going to be traveling to that event to ask if they wanted to stay with their team members. I have not asked how that turned out but it is certainly something that I will follow up on. I plan on encouraging teams local to an event to reach out to those traveling to that event to make similar offers next season.
In the past in the PNW ~35% of the teams attended two Regionals. However the teams that attended DCMP included many teams who have never attended two Regionals. There were significant capital investments made to start up the district model that will not be needed in future seasons. So if we are able to continue to raise funds at past levels there should be some money to help those teams in need that make it to DCMP and possibly CMP too. However there was not a single team that earned an invite to DCMP that turned it down and only one team that earned an invite to CMP that turned it down and yes funding was a part of the problem of why they couldn't attend.
However as I said previously the real success stories are not the ~15% of teams that made it to CMP or the ~40% that made it to DCMP, it was the ~65% of teams that have never been able to attend more than one event that now were able to get the full engineering experience.