Thread: FIRST in Your School District
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Unread 10-04-2008, 21:14
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Re: FIRST in Your School District
Fredi,

I believe (but don't quote me) the single school board with the highest participation is the Toronto District School Board with 21 schools:

2505 Don Mills Collegiate Institute / St. Andrew's Junior High School
1246 Agincourt CI
188 Woburn Collegiate Institute
865 Western Technical-Commercial School
1814 Northview Heights SS
1815 Sir John A Macdonald CI
1310 Runnymede CI
1835 RH King Academy
854 Martingrove C. I.
1404 Dr Norman Bethune CI
907 East York Collegiate Institute
1514 West Humber CI
919 Harbord CI
2670 York Memorial Collegiate High School
2076 Thistletown Collegiate Institute
1558 Albert Campbell CI
1564 A.Y. Jackson SS
2185 Etobicoke Collegiate Institute
1605 George Harvey CI
2198 L'Amoreaux C.I
1219 Emery Collegiate Institute

The high participation is largely due to a funding formula that was developed and championed by Mark Breadner, former Computer Science teacher at Woburn CI, former Regional Director of the Canadian Regional, GTR WFFA 2007, and now a vice-principal in the TDSB.

The TDSB has a funding incentive program that makes starting a team a much smaller barrier. The justification at the school board level isn't too tricky: for the fraction of what it costs the board to fund a football team, schools can have a robotics team, where kids can learn career relevant skills, ALONG with a lot of the same competitive character building traits that conventional sports offered.

The side effect is that robotics teams now outnumber football teams in the TDSB, I believe.

As an aside, the TDSB includes only PUBLIC schools in the actual city of Toronto (no suburbs). There are many more Catholic school teams and private school teams, as well surrounding Greater Toronto Area teams.

Overall, we are seeing a stronger trend of school boards jumping on board the funding wagon, which I believe is a good thing. Corporate sponsorship will always be (and should be) the primary driving force behind FRC, but school board financial support should never be discounted. If they're already willing to support sports teams, then why not FIRST?
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