[FIRST EMAIL] Stop Build Day Survey

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by efoote868

I will give you an example using my team's numbers:

My team has about 120 students. During the build season, they're required to meet 3 hours per day, every day, after school to be considered on the team. Keeping all students occupied and out of trouble is a huge undertaking in itself.

After stop build day, there are about 20 dedicated students that will continue to meet or work on robotics, but the work is infrequent and not mandatory for everyone.

If stop build day is removed and our build season is extended, I doubt we'd keep a "team-only" stop build date. Our build season would be extended just like everyone else's, and that would significantly increase the amount of work - 300 student hours / day. Those 300 hours could be spent on schoolwork, athletics, jobs, other activities.

Not to mention, the school's coach of the robotics team is compensated extra the same as an assistant cheerleader coach. If the build season is extended any longer, we would have a very hard time finding teachers to sponsor the team.

Other than the size of my robotics team, I don't think my team is unique in how it would treat no stop build date.

I guess at the end of the day I find myself still incredibly puzzled by your plea to keep stop build day in place. You discuss how the potential removal of it could negatively affect your team. However, none of the issues you state are necessarily involuntarily out of your control as a mentor.

The current rules package for FRC robot fabrication causes my team, and many others, to have to adjust way out of our comfort zone to to meet everything from routine schedules up to overarching goals. Have to shut down fabrication for almost 1 out of 6 weeks during build season for midterm exams? "Sorry, that's out of your control as a team, but you have to work around it." We do. Live in a place where they shut down schools and virtually padlock the doors to keep you out over the threat of snow? "You'll come up with something! It's all part of THE PROCESS™." However, these problems are out of our control and as team leadership, we have made it a priority to not let problems out of our control define how we achieve success as an organization.

When it comes to potential removal of stop build day, your core fear seems to be that you and the rest of your team leadership will fail to adjust for, finalize, and maintain objectives and expectations that could affect the sustainability of your program. Does the mentorship of the team have no say in how often meetings are held? Do students hold your family members hostage with guns pointed to their heads until the student leadership feels like they have had sufficient meeting time?

No one on this board is going to make the decision to keep or end stop build day but each of us has the opportunity to set the guidelines for our teams concerning how we handle either approach.