[E. Wood]

While I agree that this bill is a step in the right direction, I don't think that it goes far enough. For example, our team was pushed out of the school system this year. Long story short, even though the school had the resources and space to accommodate our team, the liability issue of not having a staff member from the campus we operated on was too big of an issue to overcome. As a result our official designation as an school sponsored activity was taken away and we were told we would have to pay to use the school during non working hours (aka weekends and certain week nights). Keep in mind that we had not received funding from the school in at least 6 years, but were now being asked to pay them. Fast forward a few months and we are in our own building outside of SMCPS and are paying rent. This has increased our budget by about 40%. Despite all this we have maintained our partnership with SMCPS and remain on friendly terms.

Our school system, on the other hand, just got a new grant of $350,000 for after school activities. This is not an uncommon occurrence for SMCPS, which has only three medium sized public high schools. While this latest grant is large, they do receive numerous grants each year in the tens of thousands of dollars from numerous sources. This of course is on top of all the county, state and federal funding they have access too. However, this money is not always spent wisely. My wife, who is a teacher, until recently had a computer that was not capable of playing a video or browsing the web. Meanwhile, her school had brand new Ipads (paid for by a grant) for the student to use. However, these Ipads lacked the software needed to be useful and teachers weren't given the ability to purchase, install or get training for the software they wanted. As a result the Ipads mostly serve as paper weights.

Our team, on the other hand, does not have access to most of this money and will not have access to the new money if this bill is past in its current form. We take our relatively small budget and give 40-60 students valuable hands on educational experience that we all know as FIRST. I think that explaining how valuable this experience is would be preaching to the choir so I won't do it.

My point is, why limit the availablity of this funding the school systems? They already getting funding and often don't use it as efficiently as a community based organization could. What we should really base these types of grants on is the effectiveness of the individual program not whether or not it is run by school system. This way the tax payer's dollar is spent in the most effective way. I have to question, based on my experience, if the money will be spent in the most effective way and contribute the programs that are shown to be suitanable and effective if only the school systems are allowed to play.

With that said, good on the Power Hawks and JJ for get something done in the state government. Its not an easy task to get a bill this close to being passed.