[Riverdance]

Something that I will say definitely helped our team in a time when our administrative position was shaky and our organization was kind of up in the air was getting the parents involved. We had an administrative conflict at the beginning of last season that left our core a little bit shaken and our last season was very up in the air; we survived mostly on out-of-pocket expenses from existing mentors and the generosity of our school district, who had never provided us with much in the way of funding previously. This season, when we recruited new members, we made an effort to engage their parents, with outstanding success.

How will this help you, you ask? The new parents have brought a level of balance never before seen on our team, which is exactly what you need. Balance. Seeing as you and this teacher are the only two mentors involved, there is nobody to second a motion put forth by either of you, and if there is a disagreement you are immediately at a stalemate. My first suggestion would be to adopt a strategy to management similar to that of my team: put together a "council" comprised of yourself, the teacher, a few parent mentors, and student management members elected by the team themselves. Make sure that the students up for election are the dedicated sort that you mentioned, and not just the ones there for an easy grade. This system has served my team well, but never when our management students continually drop the ball, stop coming out to meetings, and stop doing their job.

Once you have a system like that in place, you will start to see a drop in occurrences such as parts being ordered late or not at all -- not only will more people be held accountable for the parts being ordered and ordered on time, almost guaranteeing that somebody will do it, more people will be making the decisions regarding what is ordered in the first place. This hits two birds with one stone -- the students get management experience and get more involved in the program. They feel like their opinions matter.

Of course, like I said, this entire plan is hinging on you guys getting the parents involved. Unless the teacher in question has a serious power issue, he shouldn't be averse to having more parents join in. In particular, you are looking for parents with experience in relevant fields. This will help with the learning curve that you have with the students involved on the team. If you have more parent mentor with experience in the fields that are necessary for the kids to learn, they will be able to learn more and contribute more to the overall robot build process. In turn, this will help with the lack of dedication that you've been seeing. Since they are the ones doing the actual building, they will be more invested in the outcome. You won't have as many kids sitting on their phones during competition, because they will want to help to make sure their robot is working and cheer the robot on when it does eventually get onto the field.

Sorry if this is totally incoherent and useless, I'm very tired and probably should have left this until tomorrow. I hope this helped you at least a little bit, and feel free to PM me with any further questions or if you need clarification -- I am always here to help!