Inter-school Team Membership

[Mr_I]

I appreciate all the feedback from everyone, it really is helpful.

To provide a few more data points to consider ... ours is a private Catholic school, not connected with any local school board. The students have come from other towns, sometimes from schools without FIRST teams (which no one has issues with), and sometimes from schools with FIRST teams (which is the sticking point). As friendly as we like to think we are in FIRST, the neighboring schools do have a rivalry in most other sports and activities.

So, I suppose the question should be: What do people think about joining a FIRST team in another school when your school has a team?

[Mark McLeod]

While there are several students from other teams who hang out with us so much so that they seem like team members, we don't really have the case of students officially joining from a school that already has a FIRST team. I suppose there could be local team personality or scheduling conflicts that would force a student to join another team, and I'd rather have the student join then drop out of FIRST and the engineering experience altogether.

Although we all compete hard on the field in FIRST it is of course not about rivalry, but cooperation, so a robotics team has one fundamental difference from a normal competitive high school sports or academic team in that we want every student from whatever background to “win.” The competitive aspects are confined to the field of play, while outside the 2 minutes the students are learning larger life lessons and bringing us all up to a greater experience.

This is a difficult message to get across to administrations, since we are fostering a point-of-view that can be quite foreign to the normal team mentality of inter-school rivalry, but is really very much in-line with our “education for all” society.

Our team is sponsored by Hauppauge High School, but year-to-year we’ve always had students from several other surrounding districts as members. Some are invited to encourage the startup of new teams, others are from teams that have collapsed, while still others are from schools that won’t support a team in the foreseeable future.

The inter-mixing of multi-district students isn’t limited to official team members. Just this past season we had students and mentors from 10 or 11 other local school teams working alongside us in our high school robotics lab off and on throughout the build season. In some instances, schools lacked particular expertise or mentor experience with one aspect of the robot or another. Some lacked specific equipment, such as a lathe, that they’d drop by to use to produce a part, while others had zero equipment and built major parts of their robot with our tools. Some disadvantaged or rookie schools lacked raw stock that we were able to provide and machine. It isn't one-way either, our team students did their milling at another local school. Most of us have the visits to rookie teams to get them out of the KOP and onto their wheels or treads.
The rewards for blurring school borders are broad. Students are much more socialized with other local teams and instead of one animator or programmer they have a larger peer support group.

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A Postscript on insurance issues: In our case, while non-students working on school grounds are covered by the district policy, transportation (by district buses for instance) insurance to off-site events does not cover non-district students or adults. That does add a wrinkle for out-of-district students in that they have to make their own arrangements to get to the events, unless the Team has chartered a bus, although we still accept responsibility for chaparoning them and the same rules of conduct apply to all. An alternative to school bus transportation is typically provided by parent car pools.

[Chris_Elston]

They way we have solved this issue was we started a 4-H club. Since then the robotics program was removed from the local high school and restarted as a 4-H club. 4-H has insurance that covers everyone in the club as long as they become a 4-H member. Our county covers several schools and it's not a problem to accept students from other schools, even Jr High students help with the team. It would probably be a logistics nightmare to restart or move your team to 4-H, but I thought I would mention this in case there is anyone out there that might be interested in this approach for a new team. It's been working very well for us. In fact, you get an automatic 503(c)(3) status when you are part of 4-H, insurance, and few extra things. There are few things you can't do, like have raffles because that's considered gambling. However there are way too many positives that outweigh any negatives if any. There is also the ability to accept 4-H members across counties, although we haven't had this case yet.





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[Mark McLeod]

Boy Scouts of America is another organization where you can form a team and automatically have your insurance coverage and tax-exempt status. It's not Boy Scouts, but a separate co-ed organization called Venturing focused on males and females aged 14-21.

[IndySam]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Boy Scouts of America is another organization where you can form a team and automatically have your insurance coverage and tax-exempt status. It's not Boy Scouts, but a separate co-ed organization called Venturing focused on males and females aged 14-21.

There is another program called Learning for Life. It is the old Exploring program from the Boy Scouts. Exploring is more of a carrier oriented program than Venturing.

http://www.learning-for-life.org/exploring/index.html

[Danielle H]

If you have a lot of interest from one particular school, perhaps you could talk to the school about merging teams. Morristown and Greenfield did that this year... 393. Morristown had the team and they "adopted" Greenfield. It seems to be working out great so far.

Sorry if that doesn't help.

~Danielle

[Fuzzy]

We "adopted" a senior from a nearby school this season, and we got him hooked into volunteering or mentoring for a FIRST team/competition near the college he'll go to.

I'm not sure about any insurance issues we had, but we did talk with his school's principal about letting him join the team and partcipate in the trips.

[Mr MOE]

As was already mentioned multiple times, the main issue here is liability. There are two main ways to address this. The least expensive is to create your program under an existing 501 (c)(3) non-profit group [4-H, Boy Scouts, Learning for Life - Exploring, etc.]. The other, more expensive option is to create your own 501 (c)(3) organization.

MOE 365 was part of Learning for Life at our inception. We have since incorporated and purchased insurance that covers our members. I would imagine that most situations involving members from two schools joining to form a team, if schools are amenable, could work out a liability arrangement. However, if not, one of the two options above is what you've got. Unless your group has other reasons for creating a 501(c)(3) organization, you might want to go the lesser expensive route.

If you are planning to take the leap to creating a 501(c)(3) non-profit, there have been some very good threads relating to the process. Also, MOE gave a presentation at this year's FIRST Robotics Conference on this topic. Charts are available on the FIRST website.

Good luck!

[Mr_I]

As a teacher, let me say that it is frustrating to see this much enthusiasm in a discussion, knowing that the discussion is off track. Let me see if I can get us back on track.

There is no need or interest in merging teams; there is no need or interest in forming a 501(c)(3); there is no need or interest in getting the Boy Scouts or 4H involved.

We are a private high school with a FIRST team, surrounded by towns whose schools have FIRST teams. (Within 15 miles of our school there are probably 10 schools with teams.) We have students from these other schools that have been on our team, and this is the source of the question:

Is this typical, desirable, or a potential source of problems?

Thanks again for the help.

[Mr MOE]

Mr I:

Sorry to assist in getting this discussion off-track. Some say I am skilled at that

My response to your question is "it all depends."

My follow-up to your question would be "why are these students joining your team when their schools already have teams?"

My second follow-up is "what do the teams at the schools these students are coming from think of this?"

Answer these two questions and you will be well on your way to knowing if you have problems or not.