Does your school give your team money?

[Joe Menassa]

The school your teams belong too, does it supply you with any money because our school barley even recognizes us. Also i wish there was a way for the school to care more about us, we have done it for like 7 years now.

[Stephanie]

as far as i know, our school has not donated money to our team. However, our district contributes money to all teams in the district.

[Bill Gold]

Stephanie, SJUSD gave every team about $2,500-$3,000 this year. It's not the $5,000 we all got last year, but it's better than a lot of schools/districts.

[mnkysp6353]

We get about 7000 from our school a year. The best way to get the money is make yourself noticed. Present at every school meeting where funding is decided upon (ie education foundation). Also it helps to get people with alot of contacts on your side. Ask everyone on your team who they know and you might be surprised. I was, we received 5000 from a contact a team member had.

[Wayne C.]

One problem our school had with giving us money was that money could not go to the benefit of any individual student and understandably so.

So we took another path and asked the school to cover the expenses for "common" needs of the team. These include our travel expenses for the chaperones (required) and our ground transportation costs for the whole team.

As a result we were fortunate to receive $3500 towards travel in 2001 and have a pledge of $3000 for this year if we qualify. This, and a place to meet, are all we ask from the administration.

Our robot building costs and such are covered fully by our sponsor and we receive a very generous stipend from them which covers registration and part of the travel costs. Students work hard to fund raise the rest- very hard!!!

[JVN]

on my old team we never got any direct funding, but the school board did reconize FIRST as an extra curricular activity, and as such they compensated our advisor for participating. It's just a small bonus to motivate teachers to help out...

[matt sorgenfrei]

Our school gives us money a few different ways:
First of all, we recieve a signifigant sum of money from the Regional Occupation Program. Since we are a Voc Ed class, we generate money from spending extra hours (a lot of them) after school.
Secondly, we occasionally recieve some PTA money, but not much.
And finally, our school district has a lot of money to give in the form of grants, so we often apply for, and recieve, them.
Matt Sorgenfrei

[Jordan A.]

Our principal said she could only offer us 400-500 our of her budget. Which will be used mostly for shipping costs.

[Christina]

Smithtown High School gave my team (810) about $8200. They covered the first competition ($5000) and now they're covering our desposit for our Nationals accomodations ($3200). So, our school has kicked in a good amount of money.

~Christina ºoº

[Matt Garthwaite]

Our school (Perry Meridian HS) used to give us a little money from a grant through the township. I'm not sure we even get that now. We don't get any money directly from the school, because we're not recognized as a school-sponsored team, even though we must abide by their rules and regulations as though we were sponsored by the school. Plus, the township changed computer companies, so we lost about half of our sponsorship because of it!

[Alfred Thompson]

Our school gave the team $2000 this year. Not as much as a sports team but more then most non-sports activity.

[Jeff Waegelin]

We got $200 for registration for the OCCRA off-season competition. Our teacher gets some money for being the leader of an extracurricular activity, but other than that, we don't get anything from our school or our district.

[RBrandy]

Our school district gives us so much money in our account, but any money left in that account get taken out of the account and gets added up at the end of the with all the extra-curiculars in the district and divided amongst all of them.

[Blinky Bill]

Money from the florida school board system.....LOL.
Cows would fly and have pigs as babies before we see money from them. We get all money from our sponsor...Boeing.

[LIRudie]

my team happens to be very lucky in this department. our school may not consider us a sport, but we are a major club. Our superintendent of schools came to the Long Island competition last year and absolutely loved it. Last year our funding was $7,500... this year with some pull we got that bumped up to about $40,000
thank god for them because getting corporate sposorship is not our forte.