Quote:
Originally Posted by Katie_UPS
Why is everyone so insistant that having a team in every highschool means every highschool has its own team? Having a team in every highschool is totally plausible. Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) has atleast 20 high schools. If MPS had five or six FRC teams, we could cover all the highschools. How? By having one team be composed of multiple schools. There are a couple teams I know of that do this: MOE (365), More Robotics (1714), UPS (1675), CORE Robotics (2062), and I'm sure there are more.
The second quote supports my idea of combining schools (and maybe even teams). If two struggling teams with 7 kids and 7k combine, they have 14k and 14 kids (numbers are arbitrary). If you combine the three local schools of smallsville, state; then you have only one group asking the local businesses for money.
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Personally, I agree with you. It is a very good way to get around the worst things that would really get in the way of an
effective and
sustainable team. Team 93 also does this and we've had some success over the years.
[DEVIL'S ADVOCATE]However, but there is a problem you may have not noticed. Your effective presence at your main school becomes concentrated there, which has happened to N.A.C. Team 93 (my team). So in reality, you are really only effectively covering one school, not three. Why?
It comes down to word of mouth and logistics. Word of mouth is a problem because, let's face it, the people most likely to find FIRST are the friends of FIRSTer's. To circumvent this, a lot of communications and demos to spread the word around those other schools would have to done.
How does logistics come into play? Well, when most kids are freshmen, the time they are most likely to find out about and join FIRST, they probably don't have reliable transportation to and from your main location unless you figure something out.
Both problems are workable, but it requires a lot of extra work and even then not everyone who would love to will actually be able to participate. [/DEVIL'S ADVOCATE]
Point is, it isn't a perfect solution, although it is good. So a decision about which path would be taken would have to be made in each circumstance that would work the best for that particular school or group of schools.