[Kleiman]

I am quite surprised at the direction this discussion has gone.

I am not sure how it is valuable to mathematically determine the overall additional cost to "one-event teams" distributed over all participating teams to imply that I am taking a hit of a few hundred dollars.

I don't think I could have been more clear earlier with my numbers, but I will try one last time to reiterate and hopefully return to a meaningful discussion.

In the regional model it cost $5000 USD to play once and potentially qualify for worlds.

The Toronto District School Board saw the deep rooted value in this remarkable program and invested heavily in getting more teams to be able to participate. They agreed to pay the full $5000 USD (~$6400 CAD) registration fee for every team for a single annual event. Rookie grants from FIRST easily cover your first two years of operating costs (and it can be stretched if you are careful). The program has exploded. Huge numbers of new teams have joined including mine. My students lives were transformed as was my school community and we have connected with so many other schools and students in the FIRST community. The foreseeable future meant that I could participate in FIRST with an annual operating cost of ~$2000 and so could any school in the city. I do a lot more than just run a robotics club, but this seemed well worth it to me. Many other teams, I'm sure, would reach the same conclusion, and many more young people in Toronto could play. Who won from this arrangement? STEM and Education.

Now, it costs ~ $7500 CAD to go to 2 district events and ~$3000 to go to district champs. The TDSB cannot pay for all of that for every team. Instead, they have very generously offered $5000 CAD for districts and $1500 for district champs for every team (up to ~$6500 CAD like before).

Here is where the math is not at all complicated but many people seem to be misunderstanding me. This means that I now need to pay ~$2500 CAD to register for my 2 district events. That is an increase from $0 to $2500 CAD. That is more than double my previous operating cost. If I am in the top 60 teams in Ontario, I pay another $1500 CAD.

The previous model allowed more teams in Toronto to play with less money and less time commitment. I thought I had signed up for a program centered around spreading STEM education. Apparently it seems very obvious to the majority of posters here that the benefits of more rounds of play for better value, the opportunity to iterate between events, and cost savings for large scale competitive teams who already attend multiple events, outweighs the benefits of setting a lower bar for all to participate. The change from Regionals to Districts will provide lots of benefits. The main added cost is that it costs Toronto teams between $2500 - $4000 more just to play, and many more hours and/or people to supervise and plan. For non-Toronto teams, they too need to spend at least $1000 CAD more than in the past and either attend two events or quit after one regardless of your team's performance.

If you want to play more, iterate, or increase your odds of winning, then to me it is reasonable that you need to pay more for those added experiences. If you want to spread STEM and get kids excited about building robots in every school that you possibly can, then set the financial and time commitment bar as low as possible to play and work hard at establishing publicly funded partnerships like the TDSB's model for Toronto based teams everywhere.

I am pretty new to FIRST, but I can already clearly see that when people participate in this program they are never the same after. This is hands down the best educational experience I have ever offered to students. Public educational institutions will eventually get on board and fund what they can if we ask. What I would ask in return is that FIRST Canada maintains their model that keeps total cost down. Any increase is too much if you ask me, regardless of the added benefits. The benefits of the program as it was are far more than enough to warrant more participation.