Quote:
Originally Posted by lynca
The biggest losses are definitely more rural or small city schools. I can put exact numbers on these with a little data crunching if people are interested.
Texas Regions that struggle.
1. South Texas
2. El Paso
3. West Texas
4. Small towns scattered across the state.
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I was raised in the Texas Panhandle. I went to a small high school (six students in my graduating class.) I know how hard it would be to not only start an FRC team but to maintain it in such a small community. My father was an agriculture teacher and he would have been the closest qualifying individual to being a mentor for our team. Many of the teams from West Texas and the Texas Panhandle would fall in the category of small class sizes, little to no computer science taught in the high school, large farming and ranching communities, small amount of financial support from industry, etc. In small schools, students participate in multiple activities at the same time since there is not a large population of students.
Last year, we worked with a team at Hub City that had two mentors and seven students. I think that there are probably more teams that fall into circumstances such as these. I know of a team here in Austin that folded due to the teacher leaving and losing their only technical mentor.
Just as increasing the success of a school, many times it falls on a committed individual and most often that falls on the shoulders of a teacher. Many schools do not a financial structure to compensate teachers for this commitment. FIRST is seeking to get a partnership with UIL in the state with the hopes that this will lead to more finances and support from within the schools. School finance in Texas is in a mess and does not look to be be getting any better in the near future. I believe it is a false hope that such a partnership will open the books up to financing of many teams in the future.
It is very interesting that Minnesota has such a large number of FLL teams and they have seen an increase in the number of FRC teams. Laying the groundwork at younger ages drives success and creates interest not only at the student level but at the elementary level as well. Having taught in public school classroom and being a fourth generation teacher with in Texas. The support of elementary programs from parents is huge. As students begin to move thru school, parental involvement continues to dwindle. Parent support of a program is instrumental in assisting the mentors and teachers of the program.
As some others have mentioned here, geographic isolation is another big factor. Not only is the distance to contests but the distance to supporting veteran teams is a great distance as well.
I also believe that the prevalence of other STEM/Robotics contest in the state have played a factor. The growth of FTC and VEX has been huge in the state of Texas. see post from Andy about the number of teams in the past few years. In addition, BEST robotics continues to be successful throughout the state of Texas. These contests do offer a truly beneficial STEM program to the schools that chose to participate in them. Schools chose to participate in them for a variety of reasons: past experience, costs to startup, space, tools requirement, mentor availability, etc.
I believe Andy's questions are great questions. I also believe something could be learned from the Kansas City growth FRC that included 3 year commitment finances partnership between the teams and grants available.