[YAK'ker]

wow - I really needed to read this tonight. I'm exhausted from our districts, and feeling very discouraged.

Being from a poor, small, rural high school that has little to no access to engineering professionals who are willing to help mentor our team is hard. We go to competition and marvel at the beautiful robots that were designed by professionals (some actually built by students.) We see chairman's award videos that were either professionally produced or produced with equipment that we could only dream of using. We try our best but always the brass ring is outside our reach, or so it seems.

But the bigger successes are intrinsic to our team:
STUDENTS design, build and program the robots with very little adult help
STUDENTS write all the grants we need for our small ($10,000) team budget
During most years, we have 10% of our student body on the team.
We have had a 100% HS grad rate on our team since we started in 2007.
We have had 100% of our team either go on to college or join the military since they graduated, some to MIT, CalPoly, Stanford, etc.
We do things not because we think it would be good for the Chairman's Award, but because they fit our community needs and they are fun. We have recycled over 60 tons in the past 4 years, about 1/3 of it e-waste. We host a Nerdapalooza game night and help with a Sciencepalooza and have a blast, while helping make STEM more fun.

There's lots more....but I guess I just needed to get some of that off my chest for now. Also feeling discouraged because our school admin is discontinuing our woodshop and drafting programs, which have provided a home for our team. We are trying to find options and just hoping to survive. It's hard to go to competitions and see so many teams that are so flush with money and mentors. Just have to keep seeing that the brass ring isn't as important as the successes that being on the team gives our students.