Is your school public or private?
- Private
How many years has your team been in existence?
- 9 seasons
What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)?
- Sporadic money for tools. New facilities (2 years old), designed by team mentors and built for the team, and the engineering, and physics classes.
What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school?
- This year (June-June), we had total expenses (both cash and in-kind donations) around 30k. One thing to remember, on your balance sheet for the team, in-kind donations get placed at cost in both the income and expense categories - otherwise you don't have a true picture of everything you get and spend. If you lose a sponsor who did a bunch of in-kind stuff, you'll still have the expense of buying whatever they had been giving you! I'm not entirely sure how much of that comes from the school, but not much. About 1/3 is in-kind donations, another 1/3 came from large corporate sponsors, and the last 1/3 was a combination of student fees and other small donations.
Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many?
- Yes. The school provides a stipend for (I think) two individuals.
Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC?
- We have an FLL team, and are working on getting an FTC team started. The FLL team was started when our FRC team paid all of the fees their first year, and the school has picked it up since.
Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours?
- No. However, as a result of the FRC team, the school has started up classes in programming and engineering.
What does your team do for your school?
- One of the biggest things we do is recruitment. The new STEM Center at the school is a major draw, and when prospective families are given tours often a team member will jump out to lead the tour in the space (anything to skip class, right?
). I've heard (anecdotal, but hopefully accurate) that the team has played a major part of some students decision to come to the school. Of course, there was also the design of the STEM Center - they were going to have 3 large classrooms, until we helped them redesign it into a truly awesome space.
The school administration has always been really supportive of the team. Simply put, we've been very fortunate to have a couple of major donors over the years, such that we haven't needed very much money from the school directly. Instead, the administration comes to visit us, they support the students getting out of school for competition, and while it took a few years (big projects always do!), they got us a killer space at the school, one of the best build spaces in the state!