[D_Price]

Hello Trez,

As an original member of Team 1708 and an Engineer and a Mentor for the team now, I have seen our numbers fluctuate through the years. Until about 2 years ago we only had team meetings during November until end of competition season. I adopted a plan that we hold an assembly at the beginning and end of every school year for the whole school to attend.Try to also travel to the other feeder schools within your district, holding an assembly and bringing a robot to demonstrate and present the program. Try to attend school board meetings to present to them the program and yearly updates. We went from 6 students to around 25-30 yearly participates. Cheers if you need any help feel free to pm.

Originally Posted by trezelle2

Hi!

Our team is currently struggling with numbers. We started as a rookie team with around 10 students, but we've brought around 8 to competitions our rookie and 2nd years. As we start build season this year, we have 6 students. In addition, most of our team members started with us, and are therefore upperclassmen.

Our school has around 200 students, many of whom are active in sports, including winter sports, which often conflict with our team.

I have noticed that, while we get a few new faces each year, the amount asked of each of the members due to the team size has influenced some students to decide that the team is too great a commitment and dial back participation or leave.

We've hung flyers around the high school, made announcements, and talked to upcoming 8th graders at the end of the school year. We have one teacher as a mentor; we struggle to bring in more students, especially as 'bring a friend' suggestions don't work when most of the team members are friends with each other.

We've been approached by a neighboring school district and are working to bring the two schools together to grow our team, so we'll have more team members, but we want to be more sustainable overall.

Any suggestions for recruitment would be really helpful!