Current Districts Map. Who is next?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I think this is ridiculous. I'm certainly not a proponent of "expand at all cost" or measuring program health by team quantity, but suggesting to combine existing and sustaining teams for the sake of reducing headcount is absurd.

In certain scenarios it may work out beneficially (especially for teams that are currently floundering), but to use it as a blanket statement is far fetched. The vast majority of teams operate in a school-based system for a reason. While there are plenty of success stories outside of that system, don't interpret that to mean that any team can break away from their school and survive. Once you start merging teams, you're breaking that school-based system. You're forcing teams to haggle with logistics (student transportation/liability/meeting times/recruitment/funding/etc) that they wouldn't have to otherwise. In many cases, interested students may not be able to participate in a function that requires them to be transported off campus or meet outside of traditional afterschool hours.

In other words, what good is creating "sustaining" teams if you reduce the capacity for those teams to positively impact their students and community?

I've never found the One School One Team model to be better than the One Team One Community model. Would it be optimal? Possibly, I don't have anything but anecdotal data on the benefits or drawbacks of that model (and, to my knowledge there's nothing BUT anecdotal knowledge out there, if I'm wrong send me the study)

I proposed this culling partially in jest but mostly because I wanted to get folks talking about the idea of merging teams to increase sustainability, student impact, and community impact.

Let's talk about the hierarchy of needs for teams.

1. Build Robot
2. Build functional Robot
3. Build reliable Robot
4. Build elimination caliber Robot
5. Do other stuff a team should do

If two teams are both sitting at level 1, maybe combining their resources could get them to 2 or 3... which, as someone who has been at level 1 before, is substantially less sucky.

It just seems like a bad situation where we incentivize folks to grow teams but we don't really seem to care if the teams are inspiring students and communities. I've said it before but a failed team is worse than never having had a team there.