[Robocat1]

The Robocats, Team 379, raise over $20,000 a year in fundraising (each team member must raise $500, or pay, in order to attend the 3 competitions we enter each year). We fundraise 12 months a year!

We also write grants and local small businesses/clubs are recruited to donate (ranging from $25 to $1,200). We have no corporate sponsor now, although we did have GM Lordstown for our first 3 years ($5,000, 3 employees - not engineers - and a van for competition transportation of tools).

Our school pays only about $3000 for advisor stipends (we even pay for our buses and bus driver hotel room/food and subs to cover the two school advisors). We have about 25 team members.

Every year we plan to attend 2 local regionals (CLE, where we don't spend the night, even thought its 90 minutes away) and PIT or MI (we don't stay in PIT either) and one "big" trip - nationals or another regional where we go a day earlier to tour. CLE & PIT in the same week hurt us this year! Students (and advisors & community volunteer mentors), even if they meet the $500 fundraising goal, still pay for their food & admission to any "tours" we go on.

Regarding "canceling" a regional to attend Nationals if you qualify - we tried to cancel Toronto two years ago after we won the CLE Chairman's Award, but we not permitted to do so. Rather than loose the registration fee, we left home at 2 a.m. TH to get to competition with, I think, 6 students and 2 advisors and competed (and made it to semi-finals). We did manage to raise enough to get to Atlanta, but it wasn't easy!

Maybe FIRST can find a way to be more flexible in the future. It cost us about $10,000 to attend nationals with 16 students! (Reg. fee, hotel, air fare - cheaper to fly than take a bus!). Canceling the Toronto trip and getting our $5000 registration fee back would have been helpful.