[dougwilliams]

I'm curious about the "appointed student officers" selection. I'm surprised that more teams have that, then have elected student officers. For those teams - who are the appointers, and on what grounds do they make the appointment?

We happen to have elections, where both students and mentors elect for positions. We have elections after the season is over, so mentor votes and graduating seniors votes are weighted slightly more heavily.

We have gone back and forth the last few years struggling with funding, and our approach. We have had mandatory hours required to go to competition (but always take all). There are certainly students who could only support a few hours a week, but provided more back to the team with work in those few hours than other people on the team who were much less rigorous in their work ethic during meeting times; so hours never seemed to work fair.

We have also had "mandatory" fundraising events, but not everyone can attend all. This year we are switching to a contributed value model. At any given fundraiser we take the total raised and proportionally "apply" that to each student based on how many hours they worked at that event vs total number of student hours at that event.

We have a seasonal estimate of necessary funds, and we deduct off sponsorship money to the team, and then see whats left to make up and go down the list student by student with what each will need to contribute (if anything, we have yet to require finds paid, but we have told families that this is on the horizon if we don't get enough sponsorship money).