[KenWittlief]

I can think of one good reason why your school would do this. The primary purpose of FIRST is to give students an opportunity to work with engineering and science professionals, to see what it would be like to have a career in those fields.

The FIRST program is very concentrated on a relatively small handful of students at each school. From the schools persepective it is best to have as many students as possible rotate through the program, in fact it would be best to have all new students every year.

From the teams perspective that means you lose all your experienced students, and you may not do as well in the competitions. It would be somewhat like having a rookie team every year

but if the goal of the administration is to reach as many students as possible, then this is a logical thing to do.

If they are saying students can be on the team for 2 years, that is a reasonable compromise.