Quote:
Originally Posted by staplemonx
What are their 5 / 10 year goals? What is their plan? Why should we do more to help FIRST than we are already doing? What is in it for FIRST's workforce (teachers, mentors and volunteers)? What is in it for FIRST's customers (students, schools, school districts, counties, states)?
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tldr; FIRST needs to explain their goals in depth to more Board of Educations, so that they can plan and cooperate better.
So this is one of the biggest problems that this post brings up. It is extremely difficult for students, schools, and board of educations to back FIRST when they do not have any idea of where things are going.
I went to a party Saturday night that had every single high up person for the GABOE CTAE Department in attendance (it was a going away party for one of their people who happens to be my aunt). As the only one at the party who was still in school (for another couple of weeks at least
), a few of them asked about some of the career tech programs at my school to see how much of their work was actually reaching the school level. Through the conversation, I brought up FIRST and how amazing a program it was, and shockingly, it was only in the past couple of years that they were fully aware that FRC was a thing in our state. They asked me a lot of questions about the program, and all seemingly were about growth and how it could be shared with every high school in the state. Sadly I was not the best ambassador, for I could answer only parts of their questions, because I myself had no idea what the future held for FIRST.
The Board of Educations for most states can not fully back a program, if they do not know what they should be planning on. On top of that, FIRST is very expensive, and while there are lots of sponsors out there, the overall cost can be overwhelming. For example, there are 447 high schools in Georgia, and each one would operate with, let's say $30,000. That is still 13.4 million, which is very hard to get behind when a lot of GA schools are trying to keep their lights on.
Overall, FIRST needs to be more open about their future plans, so that students can be better ambassadors, and Board of Educations can be in a better place to assist them with their goals.