Questions: Support From Your School (Financial & Other)

[Jon Stratis]

Is your school public or private?
- Private

How many years has your team been in existence?
- 9 seasons

What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)?
- Sporadic money for tools. New facilities (2 years old), designed by team mentors and built for the team, and the engineering, and physics classes.

What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school?
- This year (June-June), we had total expenses (both cash and in-kind donations) around 30k. One thing to remember, on your balance sheet for the team, in-kind donations get placed at cost in both the income and expense categories - otherwise you don't have a true picture of everything you get and spend. If you lose a sponsor who did a bunch of in-kind stuff, you'll still have the expense of buying whatever they had been giving you! I'm not entirely sure how much of that comes from the school, but not much. About 1/3 is in-kind donations, another 1/3 came from large corporate sponsors, and the last 1/3 was a combination of student fees and other small donations.

Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many?
- Yes. The school provides a stipend for (I think) two individuals.

Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC?
- We have an FLL team, and are working on getting an FTC team started. The FLL team was started when our FRC team paid all of the fees their first year, and the school has picked it up since.

Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours?
- No. However, as a result of the FRC team, the school has started up classes in programming and engineering.

What does your team do for your school?
- One of the biggest things we do is recruitment. The new STEM Center at the school is a major draw, and when prospective families are given tours often a team member will jump out to lead the tour in the space (anything to skip class, right? ). I've heard (anecdotal, but hopefully accurate) that the team has played a major part of some students decision to come to the school. Of course, there was also the design of the STEM Center - they were going to have 3 large classrooms, until we helped them redesign it into a truly awesome space.


The school administration has always been really supportive of the team. Simply put, we've been very fortunate to have a couple of major donors over the years, such that we haven't needed very much money from the school directly. Instead, the administration comes to visit us, they support the students getting out of school for competition, and while it took a few years (big projects always do!), they got us a killer space at the school, one of the best build spaces in the state!

[YAK'ker]

our budget is around $15K. We have run our program as an after school activity for 7 years and as a class + after school activity for the last 2. Unfortunately, our shop teacher is retiring this year and there are no plans to fill his job, so we are back to the after school activity mode (if we don't go 4-H, it's still up in the air.)
We only run FRC, have started 2 FLL teams, but they failed after a few years, because there were no adults available to keep them going.
Because adult help is in short supply, we concentrate instead on doing electronics and other recycling...in 4 years, we have diverted approx. 40 tons from the dump, and 1/4 of that was e-waste. we refurbish computers, office furniture, etc. and sell it (we do all of our own fundraising....the school supplies us with a room - last 2 years a Perkins grant-funded shop teacher.)
Our robotics kids also serve as school technology aides and have saved the school tens of thousands of dollars in tech repair calls.

[Fusion_Clint]

I would suggest that you focus on the success of students going on to pursue higher education and how you would use new money, instead of telling them other schools get X and we should too.

[seg9585]

Survey sent for Team 4276 privately. After you see it, you will agree it's best not used as a model for your school

[Alex Webber]

I forgot to mention in my previous post, that 1810 did present at our board meeting a little over a month ago. It was a huge sucess! There was around 350 people at the meeting for another issue, but we started out the meeting.

Let me first say, we weren't asking for money, or facilites. We were just trying to raise awareness for our program. For example, our facilites are at our overpopulated school. If they need to take our build room away for a classroom, we beleive that it will be a harder decision, because they know we are there.

We got around 7 minutes on the agenda, and used all of it. Our parents created a presentation, and then selected team members to read off slides of the power point. We also had one of our major sponsors talk about the importance of our program.

http://youtu.be/RYCH5rG3HWg (video of our presentation)

[TylerS]

Is your school public or private? Public

How many years has your team been in existence? Around 16 years

What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)? http://www.brrsd.k12.nj.us/files/308...02015-2016.pdf See pages 38, 39, and 40. We are also hoping for an increase in the number of paid stipends

What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school? The link above should answer your second question but for more info on the total budget you'll have to contact RAMP our parent organization. Their website is http://www.team303ramp.com/

Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many? Yes currently one, hoping for more next year

Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC? Our middle school has their own FLL team which recieves some support from our own budget. For example last year we donated a few EV3 kits. We have 4 FTC teams at the high-school which are all organized and funded by 303.

Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours? No

What does your team do for your school? We host the Bridgewater district event at our high-school. We make presentations to the board a few times during the year about our team and our impact on the school and country. We appear at most if not all science fairs and the like at the lower level schools. We host the Middle School Technical Design challenge at our middle school, and much more.

[Ari423]

This information for Team 423:

1. Public
2. This is our 10th year
3. Our school gives us about $1500/year (maybe a little more if we get to champs) and a room in the basement
4. The team budget is very minimal (a few thousand dollars). It's barely enough to afford the competitions and to build a robot.
5. The school provides two, low-paying jobs for the team: one mentor and one advisor. Both of our previous job holders gave up the job this year to attract two new mentors (which kind of worked).
6. The district has 2 FLL teams, one at our 5-6 school and one at our 7-8 school. We don't have a very good retention rate to the high-school team (maybe 2 kids/year). We are sending kids over to try to help improve them (myself being one of them).
7. No and no (it would be nice though).
8. We show off at pep-rallies and other school gatherings.