[Mark Pierce]

* Team Name / Number: Built on Brains 85
* Team Location: Zeeland and Fruitport, Michigan
* How many student team members: Around 30-35
* How many schools: 3 Zeeland East and West (Next door to each other) and Fruitport + some home schoolers + a mentor's daughter from a neighboring school district.
* Breakdown - how many students from each of the schools (generally) We've had from 3 to 6 for the last three years
* How do you organize your team with multiple schools:
Zeeland is definitely the lead school, with the facilities and the majority of students and sponsors. Fruitport students and teacher help as much and as often as possible.
* What are pros / cons you have seen given your arrangement:
Pros are the great ideas that come from both teams and getting more students involved. Cons definitely include the distance (around an hour one way in the winter) and coordination.
* Do you have any advice to other teams who may want to do something similar:
The key thing is communication. Make sure that everyone is kept in the loop on team happenings. We think it is a good model of how to involve very small rural schools.
We approached the partnership with Fruitport with the idea that we would be getting them ready to have their own team. We now realize just how small their community is and how difficult getting support will be for this. We are looking into splitting tasks up so that Fruitport can do more design and build at their place, possibly doing some teleconferencing and such.

Other teams in our area with multiple Schools are 288 who has some Byron Center kids with the Grandville team, 858 with Wyoming Park and Rogers, 1227 from Forest Hills and Northville Schools (5 Schools), and 1500 which accepts kids from many schools and home schoolers in the Hudsonville area. (one of their members was a member of our team last year.)