What does your school do for FIRST?

[Rohan_DHS]

Our school administration is not too supportive of our team, except for the janitors, who are pretty cool. The school at least gives us a little bit of money and a room, which we are really thankful for.

We have a huge problem with the metal shop because they won't let us turn on the power without a 'Certified Machinist', even though the students using have been trained by the metal-shop teachers themselves, and are watched by a teacher. This issue is understandable as the school can be liable. The problem is that we don't have any "tech" teacher's who support our team. They are the only ones in the school who are 'Certified Machinists'. We almost always have to get a parent, who is a machinist, to come in all the time. Last year, this parent was very gracious to send us one of the machinists from his company almost everyday.

Anyone else have this same problem? How do you deal with it? Going to another facility is not an option (something about our school board not allowing us to =S )

[Joe J.]

We get some funding from the schools, room wise we use our teacher advisor's classroom, a big shop class style room with no shop tools. We have to pay for school bus usage (even to travel less than a half hour) and our teacher has to pay for his substitutes from his class budget, but they do grant the students school business absences. The custodial staff has been helpful in letting us in and out of the building. This past year we've been getting more recognition from the schools and district, we had one of the schools principle and the superintendent of schools at our robot unveiling this past year. But on the other hand our with the schools level of involvement we're pretty much free to run things our way, we're just one of the 70+ clubs & sports teams.

[mastermind12]

Honestly our school does nothing or very little that I know of to support us. We for the first time this year had to have a woodshop in with us to use the tools in the woodshop. And we had alot of difficulty finding one to just help out on some Saturdays. Our teacher wasn't planning on running robotics again next year cause of it. She changed her mind and is going to run it but we still probably have to find a woodshop teacher to come and help out atleast on Saturdays. The school at first wasn't willing to pay for a woodshop teacher to help us out for some reason. But finally they did pay for the woodshop teachers time. I am not sure if he is able to help out next year so we might be stuck with the same problem that we had this year.

[thefro526]

We have it pretty well compared to some other teams I know. We're allowed to use the bus for transportation without cost, we get a decent bit of money from the school and it's foundation every year, build space in our pre-engineering classroom, and we're allowed to stay until about midnight or later during the build.

We lucked out this year and had a major administration change and got our Principle and Vice Principle to go to the NJ regional on Friday with us. Now they're big fans of our team just because we were doing so well out there. I've noticed that once you can get an administrator to go to an event getting support for the team is much easier.

[AndyB]

Our team is actually run out of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. Currently, we get a good amount of financial support by the university ($10,000 next year) by registering the team as an official student organization and running that way instead of through a high school.

We are asked to do a lot of things around town including parades, expos, and demo's for 'prospective student' days.

The only thing we are really lacking currently is space. We build the robot each year in a study area in the science/math/engineering building (sorry to people trying to study), and are given a small area in the basement of the building for storage.

Luckily, next year we will be moving into a brand new engineering building where we will be set up with a building area, a new machine shop, and hopefully, more storage area.

Unfortunately, we receive little to absolutely no support from the area high schools. We have no high school teachers working with the program which makes receiving student participation a lot harder. We are currently working on this.

We do have the ability to rent school vans for transportation of tools and robots but we still must pay half the gas cost I believe.

[acdcfan259]

We get no funding from our school. All our funding comes from outside sponsors. We do have a pretty nice place to work. An old metal shop room that they don't use and more it's a good amount of space.

[Woe]

In 2004/2005, the school board requested we remove the name of our school district from our literature since we are not an official school club. We tried to get "official club" standing and were turned down because:
1) we do not have a paid administrator or teacher
2) we include home school students and those from different districts

However, we have had support from individual teachers and principals. Some of the instructors not only provided extra credit for our participants, but also for any student attending a FIRST event. Two of the principals allowed "field trip" status for students concerned about their attendance.

[Katie_UPS]

Our team is a collaboration of two schools; one school supplies most of the kids, while the other supplies facilities.

From the first of the mentioned schools, we get very little, but still some, support. I'm pretty sure we get no money, but we have atleast one mentor, hopefully getting more, and our school is completely ok with us missing school for demos and competition. Unfortunately my school is not equiped any shops or even drills, which is where the second school comes into play.
The other school, that also gives little to no money, gives us our better machinests and has some of the best shops in the city (Milwaukee). They've given us atleast one mentor (expanding) and have let in their doors at least 30 hours a week during build (normally more).

The team is relativly unknown at both schools due to lack of student interest, but we do get a decent amount of support.