Recruiting Students to Teams with "non-Standard" Locations

[cbale2000]

Greetings everyone,

I'm looking for some input from the FIRST community about a problem that has been plaguing my team (and a few others I've heard of) for quite some time now regarding recruitment of team members.

Now correct me if I'm wrong in assuming this, but I think its probably safe to say that the majority of FIRST FRC teams are based out their host High School. Now for purposes of recruiting members, this usually give the teams excellent visibility to the student population (students know the team exists), and opportunities to advertise about the team to students (assemblies, football games, homecoming parades, etc.).


My question is not in regards to these teams, but teams like mine that have no traditional High School "home". To put it simply, how does a team in this position effectively draw students from local schools and/or the community?


Team 703 has had this issue for several years now, we are based out of a High School-level career center which draws Junior and Senior students from local schools to take half-day (3ish hour) programs to train for various work skills in place of certain electives (or articulated course work) at their home schools. The problem we're facing is that as the numbers of programs and their class sizes diminish in the Engineering and Mechanical area of the "Career Complex", our team size has also dropped dramatically. Our center also suffers from a lack of interaction between the different classes (unlike a traditional high school where you go to several different classes in a day) simply due to its format, and as a result many people in other programs at our school either don't know about the robotics team, or those that do, don't seem to care.

Now granted the obvious solution to this problem (for me at least) would seem to be to show get the word out as much as possible, a few examples include doing an annual demonstration and tour of our lab for graduating 8th grade students from nearly every nearby middle school (who come to tour our career complex every year), occasional demos out at local high schools (when our mentors schedules permit), and even getting involved at events at our sponsors company "Family Day", and other places like our local children's museum.

Despite all our continuous efforts however, this year our team had roughly 4 active student members and another 3 to 5 who would show up on the rare occasion. Obviously these numbers are not sustainable, especially since 3 of those 9 or so members have now graduated this year. Personally I'm at a loss at this point, I have to wonder if it's something we're just doing wrong, or not doing enough. With around 2000 high school students in our school district alone (and another 1600+ in our very close-by neighboring school district), and only 1 other FIRST team in our immediate area, I can't think of ANY reason why we should have problems getting a good 25-30 member team, but yet, here we are.


Needless to say I'm open to any suggestions at this point as frankly we're out of ideas.



I apologize for the long post, and any rambling, I'd just hate to see an awesome program that I've spent a good part of the last 6 years of my life in, fade away because we can't get new students interested in it.