[tjwolter]

Chief Hedgehog..

In terms of your main question, how to pitch this to school administration, you can probably make this argument: "We have a huge inventory of parts and such from past seasons. So we can manage this year with a little less funding. A base kit, a smaller traveling contingent." They might be impressed by short term belt tightening as they have to do it themselves often. Of course this is not a long term strategy and you should be up front with them. Paring the team down to an affordable size denies some students the chance to learn.

Intermediate range, consider inviting some of the admin types to actually attend a FIRST competition. It will be a serious eye opener.

Also, can you wean the Tech School off of Vex and get them on board with FRC? In pseudoretirement I have gone back to school at our local Tech and they are pretty fired up about FRC....

Our teams bumped into each other a little at North Star and I volunteered at Duluth so I know your set up a bit. Our team (Avis Automata 5826) is built on a radically different model. We work off school site. None of our mentors are teachers. We effectively do all of our own fund raising although the school does help with travel costs. We run a leaner budget but figure to be sustainable long term. I won't actually set foot inside the High School this season, but of course we do work collaboratively.

Support for FIRST in our school is sincere but when we ask for anything extra, even zero cost things, it rarely happens. Even asking tech ed and business teachers to suggest a few names for directed recruiting......crickets.

Fortunately we have a long running DIY robotics program in the middle school after school program. It's our farm club. We also run that largely independent of any official help. Works better that way actually...

Tim Wolter