[Zac Schofield]

From what I've seen at my school, The faculty likes our FRC Team and what it does. They help us out by paying for district event registration and we used to have a shop in our Tech Center. On the whole, the administration generally likes us and supports us. However, At the end of the 2014 season, we surrendered our shop to the school so they could have a "science room" with working gas and water for more science experiments (chemistry, physical science, etc...). It's been two years and the room is technically a science room, and teachers do use it, but with no water or gas, just a few tables in the middle of the room so students cant actually do hands-on experiments in that room. So now our shop is setup in an unused room in the middle school (Which is way smaller than our old shop.). In addition to that, they don't really announce how we did at events like other sports teams.

As for the student aspect of this question, last year there were a bunch of rookies joining the team (We had about 80 kids total, which was about 10% of the school population) and robotics was "the club to join" for the first time I've ever seen. However due to the frustrations of last season and especially this season, our population has thinned to about 60 kids, only half of which are "active" members. This year, the rowing team and other sports were more popular among students, so there as not a whole lot of interest from the students even when we demoed our robot at school assemblies.

Overall, I'd say that school interest has fluctuated considerably over the past few years, but all we can do is try our best and hope that we get new rookies who are hardworking and love robots!