Quote:
Originally Posted by wilsonmw04
I think it can be safely said there are two reasons a team folds: a lack of money and/or a lack on mentors.
They money issue is touchy. It's hard to justify spending $10k (this is what I think is needed to run a team at a reasonable level every year) a relatively small number of kids when there are other pressing needs. There are other programs that fit smaller budgets. FTC can be done on $2k, for example.
The lack of staff is inexcusable. I have seen it happen locally. The teacher/mentor can't/won't do it next year and the team folds. Why would the administration allow this? if the track coach left, someone would volunteer/voluntold to take the position. Since it's not a sport, it's allowed to fade away.
Guess it's what Dean keeps telling us. We need to change the culture of our community. If STEM was a priority, these sort of things wouldn't happen.
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You're right on both counts. Many teams get started with funding from a single source, and aren't prepared if that source goes away (thus Lil' Lavery's question about the NASA grants for first and second year teams).
As for lack of staff, I don't think we can entirely blame the schools. It takes a lot to run a team, and if a school has enjoyed support from engineering mentors outside of the school, losing those mentors can be devastating - I could easily see the teacher in that situation look around and say "I can't do this by myself!".
Part of the problem with retaining teacher/mentor participation is the time commitment. When I started with my team, we had a good, large group of mentors and we said "the team will meet twice a week plus Saturdays, if each of us just come to 1-2 of them we should be fine". HAHA, yeah right. The meeting times increased a little, but every mentor basically was there for every meeting. After our first season, we restructured and increased the time commitment significantly for our second year. Then after our second year we increased the time commitment again with an intensive offseason program, and all of the mentors nearly burned out. We've since backed off on the offseason a bit, and things are more manageable so we aren't risking burning anyone out at this point. But I could easily see a team going through the same startup process we did and just getting burned out and folding.
Then you have the case where a key mentor/teacher leaves. You know you need to replace them, but it's hard. Sure, when the team is first starting up it's not that difficult - you pitch it as a few nights a week, they're part of a team of mentors, and you'll be fine. Once you have that team structure in place, and you've started to up the time commitment, though, you can't recruit like that. You go to the people you're trying to recruit and have to say "you'll barely see your family for 6 weeks, but it's worth it, trust me!" It becomes much harder to recruit that replacement than it is to recruit the initial teacher/mentor.
When it comes to working with the school to replace the faculty adviser... the key isn't what you do when the old one leaves. It's how you've built that relationship with the school over the previous years! Many teams run themselves as a little separate from the school. They may build off-site, or have their own 501c3 to collect funding. Their money comes from corporations instead of the school board (which is where all of the other school activities get their funding). Setting ourselves up as separate like that means the school is going to treat us differently. It's something we need to do to get started, as going to a school and saying "please sir, can I have $10k?" is generally a non-starter, but something that we should all work towards changing every year. I can tell you that my team is finally in a place where we're treated like all of the other activities at the school - we fall under the activities director (formerly athletic director, we were a large part of the reason they changed the title), instead of raising money ourselves, we help the office at the school raise money for us, we've managed to get a build space within the school, and we've convinced the school that having a "faculty adviser" on the team is critical to our success, just like coaches for other sports. So I encourage everyone to work towards that sort of relationship - having the school behind you like that will help you get through all sorts of difficulties!