[KathieK]

Three things are critical when combining schools on a team: communicating to the schools, teambuilding within the team itself, and organizing all the administrative requirements.

RAGE makes a strong effort to keep our two primary school boards informed about our team. We try to attend one or two school board meetings every year with parents and students in attendance. We send out newsletters and e-mails to our school administrations so they are informed about us, as well as inviting them to attend every event we go to and to come to our practice facility so we can show them what we are doing.

We send articles to the local town newspapers so we get more publicity coverage because we are in multiple towns.

We held a teambuilding weekend at a local boy scout camp in September so that everyone one the team (adults included) could meet and begin working together, and continued teambuilding exercises at each team meeting until the build cycle began.

Fortunately this year all five of our high schools had the same school calendar, and when we had snow days (which cancel any meetings we might have scheduled) they seemed to affect all the schools. We sent out a calendar early in the year with all dates on it that we knew of at that time so that students and parents could look for any conflicts.

We had parents who organized all the different forms. Each high school requires a different set of permission slip forms, volunteer forms, chaperone forms. So a student from Rockville High School would have a folder with a different set of forms in it than a student from East Hartford High School.

Our team name, colors and mascot are independent of any high school on our team. This year our t-shirts say "East Hartford and Rockville High Schools and Friends" so that we can use the same design next year, even if we lose students from our secondary high schools.