[Rick TYler]

Originally Posted by 1075guy

The one that's always gotten me was the extra $4000 for extra regionals/championships. That to me seems like using the richer teams to subsidize the poorer ones, which I personally don't really agree with.

I think it's terrific. What's wrong with sharing the FIRST experience with students who barely get a team together? There are a lot of reasons teams are "poor," ranging from lack of experienced adults to raise money to coming from areas with little sponsor money available. None of these reasons are in the control of students. Having "rich" teams who can afford multiple regionals subsidize teams that barely scrape together the money for the KOP sounds fine to me.

I'm not convinced this is what happens, by the way. Regionals don't make money, as a rule, and cost a fortune to stage. The entry fee doesn't really cover the cost of the event -- I'm on the FIRSTWA committee and I know how much fund-raising went into the Seattle event.

EDITED: Someone mentioned that the fee to participate in FLL and FTC is $1,000. I don't know about FLL, but we paid $275 each to register our FTC teams. Since we already had some Vex parts, our budget for the year was about $3,000 (not including championships), with more than $2k of that going to IFI for parts, not to FIRST. This came to $150 a student, which is much more cost-effective than the typical FRC team. When I was still with 1294 we spent about $8,000 and had 20 students involved, which comes to $400 a student. This is why I think FTC is the growth program for high school students: FRC is just too expensive to have a program in every high school.