[whytheheckme]

I'm not an FLL person, but here are some things that seems to have been working in FRC as far as choosing kids that are more likely to be engauged and stay with the team:

*Bringing kids to off-season events, even just to spectate, and have them fill out a questionaire afterward. Also, guage engagment reactivity level of each student at the event
*Do some hands-on building projects off-season. Our FRC kids play with VEX off-season. We invite other kids not on our team to play with them, just for the experience. From the level of engagment, we can see which kids are serious. This can be modeled for FLL by using legos off-season in place of VEX in my example.
*Have a strict participation policy. For instance xxx hours per month or per week, and as soon as kids start to fall behind, enforce your policy, always.
*Have a strict behavior policy. Any screw-ups gone. Period. Make sure that this is always enforced, or the whole system will fall apart.

These are just some ideas. I can think of some for that we use if you would like. I have to go to class now though.

Jacob