Does Affirmative Action fit under the values of FIRST

[phoebe.patwell]

I'm the administrator of the team in question and I can shed a little more light as well. In regards to asking other teachers qualified to help, Grim isn't mentioning a few things. One of our current mentors is both a parent of a member and a tech teacher in the district. If necessary we could potentially ask him if he's willing to supervise as an official tech teacher without compensation. We're hesitant to do this for a few reasons, the main being that our current faculty adviser feels its morally wrong for him to get paid but for a fellow teacher not to when they're doing the same work he is. Another reason is the fact that he's not able to come every night so some nights we'd have to limit the number of team members coming. Another thing is that all of the other tech teachers in the district are already involved with other technology clubs, and don't have time to.

We do have other opportunities to allow for a larger team, such as groups that come on different days as some of you have suggested, but none are ideal. We've been given permission to fund this in any way we wish including sponsors but we'd have to find a way to record hours and funds given to the various tech teachers working. In more depth we could have systems heads and team leads attend every night but have two groups that switch on and off, but this would hinder the very familial aspect of the team that we cherish as well as make members feel like because they're only there half the time they didn't mean as much to the team.

Code Red's main focus is to help anyone and everyone learn. Whether it be learning how to build how to design or even how to manage the business end of things, everyone on the team is learning. We feel it is completely unfair to prevent freshmen and sophomores from joining because of their age because often they are the most willing to learn. That being said we have a very uneven spread of grades with around half of the team last year was composed of class of '13 and even more want to join this year. Our view of seniors joining is generally very different from most teams and clubs in general. We believe that seniors should not be given priority because we see it as they've had three years before this to try to join but haven't where as freshmen or sophomores have a chance to continue and grow on the team for years to come.

As Grim said, we do pride ourselves in having a role for everyone and every interest within the team. We use the team as an opportunity to teach people willing to be taught, it does not matter what they look like or what socioeconomic background they're from. However, not basing off of skill makes cuts very difficult. We can't give tests based on skill because we encourage a wide range of skills to join and for the most part, people don't know exactly what they want to do on the team. We try to judge mainly on interest and dedication but those are both attributes that are very difficult to judge, for instance we had one member on the team last year who was extremely dedicated and interested in joining, but once build season came she lacked the follow through. This has drifted off affirmative action but it's all relative to the fact that we have not come up with a good system to determine cuts. Does anyone have any suggestions?