school politics

[The Ginger]

Hey CD, our team has been fighting school and MSHSL policy for the past 3 years of our existence, the biggest problems we are facing are 1. that if you wish to attend an event (such as a week 0 or last weekends JUMPSTART) you are required to take/invite all students and 2. when going to an event all team members wishing to attend MUST ride in a school bus or something of the sort. no one can provide their own rides.

These seem like logical rules at first, however sometimes like in the case of week zero events you wish only to bring select students (drive and pit teams) due to there not being enough space at the event or you not wanting to have to supervise all of those extra students.

Another problem is transportation, buses in our district cost A LOT of money, so if we wanted to go to JUMPSTART for example it would have cost us $3000! I ended up unofficially attending with a nearby team (by the way GREAT job by CIS (4607) at putting on that event)

Are there any other teams in MN or around the country that have run into similar issues and if so how did you take care of the problem. I do understand why these rules are put in place but they are hampering the growth and development of our program.

Thank you for any help you can provide.

[sanddrag]

If it's a school program, bound by school rules, then the school district should be paying for the bus. If it's their rule, they need to foot the bill. End of story.

[Cothron Theiss]

Hi! I'm not from Minnesota, but I'm pretty familiar with the issues you're describing so I'll pitch in. Unfortunately, I can't help much since your school's rules are actually pretty reasonable. So you'll need to talk to your school and figure out what you guys need to do to comply with the rules and try and reach some compromise on the issues that your school may not fully understand.

As for issue #1, talk to your school about just how inclusive you have to be. Ask if you're allowed to set requirements beforehand on what qualifies members to go to off-campus events, such as an hours requirement, or a leadership position requirement, or some other guidelines that you can set in place permanently that you and your school can agree upon. If They will not agree to this, compare robotics to the sports. Not every member of the football team is on Varsity. Not every member of the robotics team is critical at events.
(That being said, I think you should always strive to let every member who puts his/her time in go to events, but I understand that's not always possible.)

Regarding issue #2, you don't have as many options. That rule is most likely related to the school's insurance, and for some reason, administrators are kinda touchy about that stuff. First, clarify whether or not parents are allowed to drive their children and only their children to and from events. Since there's almost no way that will cover everyone, see if you can find ways to offset the cost of the bus. These days, most schools wouldn't let you do this, but see if there are any odd jobs or broken appliances or work that your team can take care of for a reduced bus price. Also, see if your school would allow one of your mentors or parents to become a registered bus driver. This process can be wildly different form state to state, but my high school's marching band gets parents to become registered bus drivers so we don't have to pay for drivers. That drops the cost of buses pretty significantly.

[The Ginger]

thank you for the advice, we do try to allow everyone to come to all events, the only one we wouldn't would be week zero as it is intended, or so I have been able to gather, to be a training ground for the drive team and pit crews, other than that we want all team members to be able to participate, our coach wont anounce an event if there is a conflict, if not for CD and a friend on 3840 I wouldn't have known about JUMPSTART. but anyway, thank you again for the advice and have a great season

[EricH]

Week zero events are a chance to play the game before the robot goes into the bag. I would actually say that taking the entire team wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but I would bet that if you give the team the option of event work or shop work they'll split roughly evenly. (If you give the entire team the opportunity to go, and half of them voluntarily opt to stay at the shop, I would think your bases are covered with respect to allowing to travel.)


For your #2, you may want to talk to the school (and/or district) and request clarification on: Are you required to use school bus(es), or will "authorized transportation" of another sort be acceptable, and if so what sort of arrangements need to be made?

[Ginger Power]

Thanks for the compliments regarding Jumpstart. I'm glad you were able to make it!

4607 is well aware of the rules that you're addressing in this thread. Being forced to ride a bus to every robotics event is not reasonable, and makes it very hard for a team to be competitive. The way that 4607 has dealt with this problem is by creating a hybrid relationship with our school. We maintain the ability to use school facilities and the other benefits that come through working with the school, but we are not an official school sport. This has allowed us to keep some distance between our program and the school when it comes to school rules for sports/activities. In other words, when it benefits us, we are a part of the school, but when it doesn't we're not.

The reason we are able to use this setup is because the people who founded our team (Chief Hedgehog and his coworker) had the foresight to see those benefits. He would be the person to talk to for making the most of your situation. Shoot him a PM and I'll see if he can post on this thread as well.

[Conor Ryan]

Are the schools Athletics teams bound by the same rules?

[rsegrest]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

If it's a school program, bound by school rules, then the school district should be paying for the bus. If it's their rule, they need to foot the bill. End of story.

Unfortunately that is not how things generally work where I am located. Each department is responsible for paying for their own transportation to and from events regardless of what their event is. Athletics has to pay for travel to and from all sporting events, UIL money pays for transportation to UIL events, in my case my CTE director (because I am a CTE teacher) pays for our buses out of CTE budget.

School budgets are already strapped and - once again in my case - our bus fees are in the neighborhood of $3.50/mile and the driver gets $9.00/hour + overtime (when we travel out of town overnight we have to pay the driver 24/7). Expensive? Absolutely. Ways around it? That's up to each district.

TLDR; Travel is expensive and the money has to come from somewhere. School budgets are insanely tight - just ask any teacher who is in a district that serves a community that is losing jobs, industry, and money. The money for competitions and travel has to come from somewhere.

[MrBasse]

We have a similar rule where we are, but if kids show up to an event with parental consent we are good to go. Permission slips and waivers are your friend in this case.

Also, if a kid shows up without a permission slip, I have to give them a referral/punishment. I simply write them up and then the punishment is usually a written assignment about how they can better their behavior for next time. I keep all of that on file along with their referral. As long as I document all of my paperwork with the team, the school has had no issue with me not submitting to the district officially.

[Sperkowsky]

We have a similar bus policy and what we have done the past few years is submit the bus request very early and then talk to our school administrators who then have footed the bill for us. In our case they are not against paying for the bus as long as they know what we are doing well in advance.

[Chief Hedgehog]

Originally Posted by The Ginger

Hey CD, our team has been fighting school and MSHSL policy for the past 3 years of our existence, the biggest problems we are facing are 1. that if you wish to attend an event (such as a week 0 or last weekends JUMPSTART) you are required to take/invite all students and 2. when going to an event all team members wishing to attend MUST ride in a school bus or something of the sort. no one can provide their own rides.

These seem like logical rules at first, however sometimes like in the case of week zero events you wish only to bring select students (drive and pit teams) due to there not being enough space at the event or you not wanting to have to supervise all of those extra students.

Another problem is transportation, buses in our district cost A LOT of money, so if we wanted to go to JUMPSTART for example it would have cost us $3000! I ended up unofficially attending with a nearby team (by the way GREAT job by CIS (4607) at putting on that event)

Are there any other teams in MN or around the country that have run into similar issues and if so how did you take care of the problem. I do understand why these rules are put in place but they are hampering the growth and development of our program.

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Goodness there are a lot of issues here.

First off, there are correct channels that you must first go through when approaching the school about your activity/sport. Since you are already under the Banner of C/I ISD, you are halfway there.

So, what needs to happen is that your team needs to have the discussion at a leadership level (Captains, coaches, mentors, etc). Figure out where your team is struggling (if you have not done a SWOT, I would highly recommend getting this done, Ginger Power?). I won't get into that here, but if you want more info on this, PM me.

Back to what you have posted:

Transportation:
I am fairly familiar with your district and after working with a couple of others in the area, I can state that schools around your size do not charge that much for busing for a one day event. I do have a couple of examples of Trip Calculators for area schools (and their buses) that I can share with you, but for a 'typical' school bus to travel from Cambridge to SCSU it would cost around $350 for the day once you figure in the mileage and hourly rates (based on 8hours). MOST schools that I have seen work with this type of calculator.

As 4607 is a hybrid team (along with a few other schools that are in your Mississippi 8 Conference) that operates under Becker High School's Banner, we do have certain things that are of benefit, and other areas that are a detriment. Transportation is one of those areas that are both. We do not use the school busing for most of our events. However, we have in the past.

Training Events and Week Zero:
I am not certain the Training Events your school has looked into, but I can make an educated guess that you have attended or wanted to attend the same ones that 4607 attends. As for the Training Events, Splash (UofM) and JUMPSTART (SCSU) both are open to as many students as your teams wants to bring.

I am not sure about all of the Week Zero events that 5464 has looked into, but we bring all of our students to CenturionKrawler at Centennial (hosted by 2052 and 2472). I would like to think that all of the other teams in attendance are doing the same.

Again, I cannot imagine a bus from Cambridge to Circle Pines for an 8 hour event costing more than $350.

However, over the course of the season I could see the Transportation bill adding up to $3000.

Again, there is a lot of information on this, please let me know if you have other questions.

[Jon Stratis]

I can add that, as far as my team goes, those two issues are no where to be seen. For us, we have established rules in our handbook that lay out the requirements to travel with the team. If you don't meet those requirements, you don't travel. For travel, when we travel as a team we do so on a bus. There are some exceptions made for travelling with parents when needed (for example, if a few students can't attend the first day of competition and need to drive down the next). When we do stuff here in town, the event officially starts on-site, and everyone is responsible for their own travel.

For your situation, I can understand if there are certain distance limits placed on what could be considered local, versus what would require team-provided transportation. Asking a dozen or more families to all drive independently an hour or more away for an event does put a large burden on the families. And JUMPSTART and any event in the Cities is going to be an hour or more drive for you guys.

I certainly hope you can find room to work with your school to relax some of these constraints, but try to go into the discussion with an open mind and a willingness to learn why the constraints are in place. Maybe if you can understand the reasoning behind them, you can help the school find alternate ways to satisfy that reasoning.