School Administration troubles

[F-ball]

Since its founding several years ago, our school's robotics team has participated in many regionals, and attended nationals once. Like with any other team, our alumni have found the experience to be highly worthwhile, and we have received some attention from local newspapers and such.

Recently, however, some of the robotics leadership got into some non-robotics related trouble, and as a result, the school administration has lost its faith in both the leadership and the club as a whole. As such, it looks like the school is pulling the plug on our robotics program after this competition season. Many, if not all, of the students on the team are still in avid support of our robotics team, and do not want to forever lose this opportunity to participate in an organization such as FIRST. We are now starting to consider our only remaining option of removing any affiliation that we have with our school, and becoming completely independent of it. We understand that it will be difficult to fund raise, find a location to work in, and attract membership, but it doesn't seem as if we have much of a choice.

Seeing that this is a very controversial issue, we were wondering about the opinions of the rest of the FIRST community about this situation.

[fredliu168]

Its an unfortunate situation. I would like to point out that since the robotics leadership does not represent your entire team, try and make your school admins see how worthwhile the FIRST program is to students and the school as a whole.
I would recommend making an appointment for a presentation with the school adminitration. Get the entire team to present their case, make sure the school can truly see your passion for FIRST, add videos of regionals and such. Get your teacher and mentors and alumni involved.

[Corey Oostveen]

Definitely work hard to get the school back on your side.

If that does not work. See if there is another school that will take you in.

Our team has taken in kids from many schools. There are plenty of other stories of Teams taking in members of collapsed teams

[Mike Schreiber]

Team RUSH had a similar problem 2 years ago. Our administration was closing our school (a combination of students from various high schools in different districts) and decided that they did not want to support us. OSMTech (the school) lobbied and all seemed hopeless. Yet through our hard work, and determination we proved that we deserved the right to remain a team. OSMTech was adopted by one of it's feeder high schools, and our team is no even more fortified.

Honestly, team RUSH has made me believe that if you keep working at something and put your time and energy into proving that you FIRST needs to be in your life SOMEONE will save your team, be it who you think or not.

This saddens me greatly to hear, and I would hope that if you are not able to save the relationship with the school then you are able to keep your team.

Good luck and best wishes

[EricH]

Definitely work with the administration. If it helps you, kick the troublemakers off the team.

By the way, I would suggest that future questions of this sort be placed in the FAHA Mailbox subforum. It was created for controversial issues so you don't have to make an anonymous account.

[Doug Leppard]

We had similar problems in our old team 1083. Eventually the school shut it down.

Several from that team formed 1902 Exploding Bacon under 4H and it has been a wonderful experience. 4H has been very supportive. Now we have several schools with our team not just one school. eventually that school sent students with us.

I would try first to get the school back on if not then try to reorganize under something like 4H. Donations and insurance flow through them and they take nothing out except student dues which is small.

[DonRotolo]

Read this relevant post. The key words are "no more robot team".

If you are fortunate enough to keep this team together, rule #1 must be something that will prevent this from happening again.

And the title shouldn't be "Administration Troubles" but "Student Leader Troubles"

Don

.

[GaryVoshol]

Whatever path you take, make sure your attitude toward the school is positive. If you are viewed as going around behind the administration's back, they may just come back next year and tell you that you won't be allowed to miss school for competitions.

[Cow Bell Solo]

Try to not have them cut the program, get some facts from the FIRST website and like others said have show a presentation and/or tell why FIRST is a good program and not cut it. Maybe get past members and tell the admin about thier experiances and how it helped them in life if it did.

Maybe if you want to get a little meaner if the sports teams or other clubs have problems, like hockey players get into fight often, and ask why the school hasn't cut those programs.

It is hard to know what to say not knowing the actions of the leaders but I understand keeping that confidential. Tell admin to kick off the members from the team and that they can't rejoin if it was only one or two of the members

[popo308]

are first 2 years we were not a school team but then the school got angry at us for using there metal shop so we became a school team. at first we had alot of people on the board against us but we got the word out what we did and now we have to superintendent supporting us as well as the principal and VP...

Try to talk to the school board and show them what you do and why it is important to keep the team around...

[ebarker]

Sounds like some tough decisions are in order.

You can choose to let the administration clean up the mess or the team can choose to clean up the mess. If left to the administration there could likely be a shutdown.

If the team chooses to clean up the mess then I would suggest a plan of action created by the students and mentors and presented to the administration demonstrating how the team will recover from this.

Without knowing the direct facts, a part of this plan will have to directly speak to how the 'offenders' will be addressed. these folks could resign, or be fired to put it plainly.

If the team wants to be treated with respect then the team will have to demonstrate how to contain and discharge this damage and put it on a self correcting path to regaining the confidence of the administration.

This happens all the times with adults. You have heard it said all the time that FIRST reflects real live. This is real. Something broke, gotta fix it.

I just noticed that the title of the thread was "school administration troubles" which should be re-titled "team leadership troubles"

Honest self assessment is a real virtue in a situation like this. good luck.

[neoshaakti]

I feel your pain. I guess you have to bite the bullet and try to explain yourself in a calm manner. Administrations won't listen to you if you are angry at them, trust me. From what I've seen this year in FIRST, I think FIRST is something your administration does not want to eradicate. Just remind them that
Good Luck!

[F-ball]

To slightly elaborate on the wrongdoings of some of the leaders, it mostly involved two students and mal-use of computers at school. The first of the students attempted to steal private data from a robotics computer, and was "caught" by the second student, who reported to the rest of the robotics leadership. The incident quickly escalated to the school administration, and some prior computer history of the second student was uncovered, which had nothing whatsoever to do with robotics. Although both suffered identical punisments from the school, including being kicked from the team, members of the team were in support of the second student, as he didn't do anything wrong regarding robotics, and indeed pointed out the wrongdoings of the first student to robotics. More recently, the second student was there when the team was practicing in a different location on campus, and was reported by a teacher, which reduced credibility even further.

Also, the general trend among replies seems to be that we should continue trying to negociate with the school in one way or another. If this does not work out, however, how feasable would it be for us to run independent of the school, from some other location?

[Nibbles]

It seems like our district administration hates us. The school level staff likes us, but it is the governing board that seems to write all rules that make it impossible to do something as simple as purchase tools or build a website (please don't ask). That is why I am inviting them all to the regional this year. The advice so far is the best, put on a good presentation, get other area teams to testify with a good letter, get mentors involved. In the short term I would highly recommend adult leadership of the team.

If that doesn't end up working out, quite a few teams work away from school at another location. It WILL take lots of work, but with enough searching and asking, there is a sponsor out there (different schools/districts included) that will give you space to work and store materials. You will want to find somewhere for dedicated, long-term storage of materials somewhere.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Nibbles

That is why I am inviting them all to the regional this year.

(emphasis mine)

Why, oh why, has nobody suggested this before in this thread? You now have a very short time to do this. This might actually work!