[Rosiebotboss]

Jake,

The very first thing you should do is contact your local school committee members. I suggest calling them individually, setting up a meeting with any of them that are willing ot sit down with you and your existing teammates. Make your pitch to keep the team going, show them pictures, videos, data that supports that FIRST is a good thing thin to keep around. Plenty of good material is available in the white papers section of CD, the media section of the FIRST website and I'm sure someone has taken pictures from your team.

Make sure you tell them success stories from your previous years competition. Things like -- how many students got into their first choice of colleges because of their participation in FIRST, if any student decided to stay in school because of the team, decided on a career path because of the team....those type of positive personal stories always work well. If you can convince them from a personal level to keep the program going, they can put the admininstration/teacher infrastructure in place.

In other words......play the political game, get involved and keep them involved.

Hope that helps.