facilities

[sciguy125]

Originally Posted by KathieK

Please don't discount the use of a building "off campus". By locating such a space you may no longer be constrained to using your space when the school is open, etc.

Well, a few of us have had some off-the-record discussions about off campus sites. We feel that it'd only be usable for manufacturing. As it stands, we send drawings to the machine shop and we assemble it on campus. While it would allow us to do more manufaturing on-site and solve various problems, it creates other problems if we want to use it as a primary site.

Time hasn't been a serious problem. We're limited by the time our moderators can spend with us, not the times the school is open. The school is open from 5am?-10pm. We're supposed to leave at 10pm, but we've stayed later on several occasions. However, the school has a rather strict policy about not having school related events on Sunday. Toward the end of build period, we get special permission to work on Sundays. I'm not sure if they'll let us continue this habit though. This rule would apply whether we were on campus or not.

The other thing is that we're always supposed to have a moderator supervising things. My understanding is that this is for security and insurance reasons. This moderator must be a teacher, so parents won't cut it. On weekdays, however, he can only stick around until 5pm. That gives us about 2.5 hours. Even if we move off campus, I'm sure that we'd still need him around (officially at least).

The main reason the idea was shot down, though, was that it's too inconvinient. Not everyone lives in the area, so they can't stay too late (at least not too often). There's also the issue of transportation. I'm sure there would be a huge drop in membership if we moved. It's just not practial for everyone to drive somewhere after school. Legally, (by school policy, for insurance purposes), anyone who doesn't have their own source of transportation would have to get a ride from a faculty member that's in charge of the event (students couldn't give each other rides).

A way around most of the legal problems of moving off campus would be to dissocate ourselves from the school. If we did that, however, we'd lose our biggest source of funding. I also don't feel that it's the right direction, because, again, this is the closest thing to a technology class that the school has.

If we end up in a situation where we have to face dying or moving off campus, I think we'd be better off merging with another team and using their facilities. As I mentioned, however, I don't like that idea very much.