[Jonathan Norris]

There are many teams in Canada that are run at private schools: 610, 771, 296, 1547, 2166, and a couple more that have had teams in the past.

The high school I graduated from, Crescent School team 610, robotics was seen as one of the core parts of the school, along side sports, academics, community service ect. With their long history in FIRST the robotics program became very well known within the school and became one of the pillars of student leadership. As I know with many of the other Canadian private school FIRST teams, the robotics team was always used as a publicity tool when attracting new students.

As for courses there were two course offerings, in grade 11 and 12, that was primarily a robotics based curriculum. The curriculum in the last couple years used modified VEX games.

So yes there are many good examples of FIRST thriving at smaller private schools. With only 300 high school students at Crescent School we would regularly get 50 students signing up for the robotics program.