Inter-school Team Membership

[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.