[JaneYoung]

Jaine:
I'm looking at a lot of your questions from the perspective that sometimes there aren't easy answers. There is a lot of gray, rather than the black and white that many of us like.
Our mentors come in different packages: engineers, teachers, NEMS, parents who fill in as needed. We have mentors who have been with teams for many years, mentors who are just starting out, and we have college mentors. Within that, we may have many volunteer mentors. Within that, we have mentors who have comfortable set-ups for the teams: shops, materials, budgets and we have mentors who catch as catch can, often dipping into their own wallets.

To me, a mentor is always maturing, developing, and learning. It isn't just the students who go through developmental processes. And the team program goes through these processes as well.

So I look at all of this plus other things when I look at your questions.
One thing that I can say is that our team is working on defining the different mentors' roles this year and also working on keeping communication a priority. Things can bog down quickly with poor communication on a team. Good communication helps when personalities and approaches vary. And, sometimes there are tough calls to make that have to be made when other methods have failed.