Hello,
I am a graduating alumni from FRC Team 6458 in Semiahmoo Canada and was wondering if anyone here would be able to give me advice on my team’s situation. We are a school-based team, but just because of a lot of tension between the school administration and our team a lot of us really want to move out. The tension can essentially boil down to this:
Not that the administration specifically hates any people on the team, but the FRC mindset that our students have definitely is not something they appreciate or want to work with / find comfortable working with. They really dislike the idea of students taking club owned tools/robot to offsite locations to build, which is something the students also dislike because they work hard to fundraise / gain sponsorships to purchase these tools in the first place. Similarly, students have to make all purchases themselves on private credit cards, and then wait ridiculously long periods of time to gain a refund (and the whole time they are not allowed to take any of these tools offsite). Another issue is the lack of teacher support; although we had a great club sponsor teacher this year, FRC combined with all of the schools district policies really piles a lot of work on the sponsor teacher, and this has caused all of our sponsor teachers to refuse to come back every year (and to clarify most of this paperwork and regulations are due to the club being part of the school district).
Ideally, I want to see if it is possible for our club to exist as a seperate independent entity that uses the school space to work. We would be willing to relinquish all tools we have bought so far, and start anew. Instead, the FRC team would be reaffiliated with a non profit organization based in the city that will open “recruitment clubs” in not only our original school but also some more schools in the community. And then we aim to ask the school district here in Surrey to allow us to use the school facilities as an external organization. I find this ideal because this way, we operate in the safety of the school premises, and we get to retain ownership of administrative authority over our activities (who goes on our trips - no more cuts in the number of students to satisfy a “student-teacher ratio”, we control our own finances, we control the usage of our tools, we control where we want to build and for how long and when). These issues have really brought my team down over the last few years to the verge of collapse. Please let me know if people have done something similiar or would like to point out some errors with my current plan.
Essentially, I need assistance on how to approach this situation. We do have a Non Profit Org willnig to open a branch in White Rock (my city) and is willing to help us start a community team. But am I missing anything, and how should the alumni from 6458 approach this situation in the COVID 19 pandemic so we can get this set up before the year ends.
Wow, that sounds like a very strict administration. Are you sure they would let you work at the school if you’re not under their jurisdiction?
If possible, I would set it up with an official club at the school that uses materials provided by your teams nonprofit organization. That should solve the issue of taking materials off-site, as they’re nonprofit-owned instead of club-owned. That should also help with budget management, as you would be allowed to have your own budget rather than (I’m assuming, this is what your post sounds like) a budget managed by your school.
I have some thoughts on setting up duties of the club at the school and having it work well with the nonprofit that the actual team, but before I post those I would like more information on your school district’s policies. Do you have any examples of the paperwork that makes your teacher sponsor fold every year?
Additionally, are there any other clubs at your school that are direct dependent organizations of some larger institute? For example something like Habitat for Humanity, where there’s a club at the high school and some activities managed by another organization.
And, something to keep in mind throughout this thread: be very careful of cutting the school out completely. If you say you’re not dependent on them in any way, they have the right to kick you out physically, and not having a workspace is a very good way to not be able to exist as a team.
As a team that is technically a “school team” but has (unfortunately, IMO) moved to offsite build locations over the past 2.5ish years, before you go through with this decision, I would want to make sure that you’ve considered all of the consequences. There’s a lot that you get from being a school team, even with a relatively uncooperative administration, and if you think about things a little more you may find that trying to salvage your relationship with the school may be your best bet.
You mentioned tool usage and building off site as examples of this, I believe, but can you elaborate a little more on what you mean by the “FRC mindset” that the administration seems to disapprove of? As a mentor (and former student) on a team where we have had our share of students. including myself, who had the “FRC mindset,” I can say that my interpretation of this, at least, is something that I can totally understand a school not being down with (generally speaking, I read this as prioritizing FRC over school in various instances). If my interpretation is in the ballpark of what you meant, how do you see this improving as a community team vs. being a school team? If I’m completely off base here, please elaborate more.
We had this issue in the past when the school made all of our purchases. I’m not sure how this would work in Canada, but I do know there are Canadian teams who have a non-profit organization associated with a school team, which can make purchases for them and essentially move faster than schools are able to. In the US, many teams (including mine) have formed a non profit organization under the umbrella of Parent Booster USA, which is a very easy way to start a non-profit organization if it’s funding a school related activity. But either way, this particular issue is solvable without splitting your team completely from the school.
What is the alternative to this paperwork and regulations? I’m sure some/all of the requirements for this would go away if you were to be a team not affiliated with your school, but a lot of the paperwork and regulations are in place to protect students. If you’re not a school affiliated team, who takes liability if a student seriously injures themselves on a bandsaw? What if there’s some type of incident while you’re at a competition? I’m not saying community teams generally don’t have solutions for these issues, but it is extra stuff that you will have to worry about (I would argue it likely is as bad to deal with as the paperwork your teacher currently has to deal with).
Instead, I would look to try to lessen the load on your teacher sponsors as much as you possibly can. This means talking to other teachers, having multiple teacher sponsors simultaneously, getting parents/industry mentors/alumni to do some of the work for the teachers, cutting back on your meeting schedule to give your teachers more time to themselves, etc, to reduce burnout. Additionally, try to make being a teacher sponsor for your team more than just a supervisor role. Some people, at least, would enjoy mentoring if only they got involved with the actual build process as a hobby. On the other hand, very few people will actively want to stay and spend tons of their free time to sit at a desk and watch students build a robot year after year, when they could spend that time with their family.
Do you currently pay for your build space? That is, do you have to fundraise to cover the costs of your build space? My team’s school’s administration, for all that we wish they would do more for our team, covers the cost of building services and keeping the building open for our team. We looked into how much it would cost to keep some rooms open for even just the weekends, because right now we don’t have access to the school during weekends, and found that it would be about half of our current operating budget, just for weekends during build season!
Make sure, before you go too far into this, that you have the ability to pay for renting the school out if that’s your approach. Especially in the current economic situation, I would look to avoid anything that may increase your costs for the upcoming season. Everyone will find it harder to fundraise this year than we think.
There’s a lot of "we"s in there – who exactly is “we”? Do you have mentors on your team outside of school staff (parents, industry professionals, alumni, etc)? If not (and I’m guessing you don’t simply because of how much stress you mentioned your teacher sponsor is under), there’s a lot of logistics and such you’re planning on handling without having experienced adults there to help make some decisions. I say this as someone who has been there as both a student on my team trying to figure this stuff out, as well as (currently) a young mentor who has had to be the responsible adult for my team during competitions, etc. Who is going to supervise you when you build? Who is going to be the chaperone on trips to competitions? What are you going to do if there is a disciplinary issue at a competition, or even at a build site, that you cannot resolve? How are you getting to competitions, and who is responsible for students’ safety in the process? What will you do if a parent comes in super upset that their kid got a cut, and demands that the team pay for hospitalization or something like that?
I’ve been handling a lot of this for my team for two years. Our students are really great, so we’ve had no major issues, but I’m constantly scared to death that something bad will eventually happen and I won’t have any idea how to handle it. Please make sure that you have a group of people who have done at least some of this in the past, and who know how to handle different types of emergency situations. Being fully in charge of your team, much like being an adult away from your parents for the first time, is a double edged sword: there’s a lot of freedom you get, but there’s also far more dire consequences if you screw up than there were before.
With all of that said, I don’t know all of the details of your team’s situation. I wrote this whole thing up because I saw a lot of similarities with how I, and some others in my graduating class, saw our team’s situation for a little while. But we eventually came to the conclusion that the best course of action is to 1) deal with things as they are temporarily, and try to do the best we can, and 2) do our best to convince our school administration of the value of FRC as a program in the school. We’re lucky enough to be from a high school that is extremely serious about its academics, so we can talk in good faith with our administration about the value we think the team provides to the student population and our community. I understand that some school administrations are not just unaware of what FRC does for students, but actively don’t care about programs like FRC compared to traditional sports. In this case, if you cannot get anywhere with your school administration at all, it may be the best decision for you to form a community team. But please, please, make sure you have thought everything through beforehand to make that potential transition as smooth as possible.
TL;DR: make sure you have considered all of the possibilities for what could go wrong, how/who would handle it, and considered all of the alternatives before deciding to move to a community based team.
Hello. We have discussed this. Here is where I find it gets ridiculous in my opinion (please bear in mind I am 17 - perhaps this is indeed the norm).
Any power tools or tools being brought to the club have the right to be held back by the administration. As such, no tools brought to the club, including the ones owned by students, may be removed from school property once brought into the club without explicit permission. This is to prevent us from essentially stealing stuff, and for “safety concerns”.
Similarly, any funds raised in the name of our team belong to the club, which is a school owned entity, and therefore belong to the school. And all management of this fund must occur through the school district (taking weeks).
The biggest hassles we face that discourage teachers from sponsoring are: teacher supervision, payments, and field trip student ratios. For teacher supervision, we may not work unsupervised. Period. We may not work on the robot (school property) at, for example a garage on a weekend. We may not take things home to get them done and bring it over. We are limited to working only when the teacher is present. This puts a strain on the teacher, as well, you have to be present for the entirety of the build season. All payments are made through student credit cards, following which they are to forward the receipts to our sponsor teacher, who has to sit through and verify these purchases, after which they must contact the school admin and begin the process of getting a cheque mailed to the students home by Canada Post / handed over to the student. Purchases include anything -> duct tape, to a limelight sensor. You can imagine how many bills those are. This year, this wasn’t a major concern, we have managed to mitigate the workload by gaining the sponsor’s trust and distributing work among senior students. But this wont be the case in coming years, and even then, it takes months to recieve a 5 dollar refund. Lastly, the Surrey School District has a BUNCH of policies and regulations we must adhere to to actually go on the competition. We need to file in Field trip forms, get district approval, get all the money in, and this just creates a lot of work for the teacher.
What I hope to do is have the program located at school, but just not be owned by the school / have the FRC program become a school liability. This way, they retain the program , we retain the management of funds (aka the students can open a Paypal account). Also this way, we do not file any paperwork for field trips. we just fill extended leave forms which is like if u went on vacation.
There are a lot of clubs managed externally yes, and that is exactly what I think the team wants to be with the FRC program at my school. They want to be a part of the school as a meeting space, but they want their administrative and financial approval coming externally. The district has some ridiculous restrictions like our sponsors cannot have logos on the robot if they are filing for a tax receipt since that is advertisement (but I fail to see this with other teams). And as far as we checked, this is a district policy not a Gov Canada policy
Hello. They do not like us working late. Time and again we have asked teachers to stay longer than 2 hours after school, but they teachers remind us that “they have families and their kids do volleyball etc.” They seem to forget that we have to deal with a lot of commitments too and essentially they take it as a job rather than something they enjoy, which leads to resentment in the crunchtime of the build season. As a community team, we lose the restriction of solely being allowed to work with school educators. We can rely on our community mentors and parents to supervise as well.
Again, I definitely do not think I want to be splitting completely from my school. All that the team really wants is to hold power over the usage of thinks they think they own as a club (aka the tools and the funds from fundraising). They really dislike the idea of being forced to build mediocre robots due to district policies and regulations limiting them to working on property, in the presence of educators, and not working externally in their own time.
The non-profit we want to re affiliate with has its form of liability insurance, and therefore it wont be an issue. The kind of paperwork that annoys us is the long process to get refunds and the dates and deadlines, and restrictions on the field trips we go on.
We have so far worked on the school premises, and wish to continue doing so, but not as a school team. We want to re affiliate with the non profit and then approach the school and ask them to use their property to hold the afterschool program.
Oh yes, a sizeable community of adult mentors (over the age of 19) and team alumni guide the team every year. The stress on the teachers is really because of all the stuff school district puts them through to run a program like FRC (biggest being we cannot be unsupervised when working - anywhere, period).
Ok, I had a big response but it seems you’ve been answering most of my questions independently, lol. Here’s what I still have to ask:
Does your school have any sort of outsider approval, where a responsible adult that’s not a teacher can act as a teacher supervisor?
Do you rely on any school resources other than the space itself? IE busses, insurance, sponsorship
What exactly needs to be approved to go to a competition? You said something about getting money in, what’s that? Could you send a small number of students 1-4 “on the field trip” and have the others just happen to show up at the competition?
Keep in mind that even if you do switch to a community team and get it all worked out where you can still use the school as a workspace, if the school absolutely requires that you have a teacher now they will absolutely require you to have a teacher after the switch. If anything, they’ll tighten their restrictions, not loosen them. If you couldn’t get a community mentor to be a supervisor before, don’t count on being able to do it after.
What you are describing as your desired end result sounds a bit like my team, so let me pass on some info.
We are a school based team, started by 7 dedicated teachers and a few parents. The school is pretty supportive (less paper work than you describe, but not without issues).
Our finances, however, are not handled by the school. Early on (might have been from the start, not sure), we formed a partnership with non-profit which fundraises for the schools (not the PTO, but kind of like a “booster” organization). All our finances go through them. We still have to pay for tools and parts up front and get reimbursed, but the money is ours to control (within the rules of a non-profit).
However, over the first few years, many of the teachers found they could not afford the 20-30 extra work hours of Build Season and dropped out. In danger of folding (for lack teacher time), we approached the School Committee and managed to find a compromise. The School committee was paying the teachers a small stipend for the extra work (similar to sports coach). They allowed that money to be assigned as stipends to adult mentors. Essentially a few “top” mentors get a small stipend. However, that makes them school department employees and puts them under the district insurance policy, etc. We still have a couple of teacher mentors, which is good because it allows access to the department databases (eg), and we still have to file fieldtrip paper work, but the paid mentors are considered acceptable supervision.
In your original post you said a couple of things.
Are those students being appropriately supervised? Sadly, I can certainly see that, from the school’s perspective, only an insured teacher is considered “appropriate”.
Unfortunately, I see this as too much wishful thinking. Maybe you are lucky, but chances are that the school will want you to pay for access to the building. Even more, where are you going to store your robot, tools, etc? Most external organizations coming into schools (that I am familiar with) do not have a permanent space in the school. If you are using the school, you will still be under the time restrictions of when they will open the building, etc. You might be able to “bug out” for some days (we get occasional snow closures), but unless you have a parent with a well equipped shop, you will not want to be moving build spaces every few days.
You also need to consider things like attending a competition. I did not check all, but the competition in Victoria [yeah, alma mater] this year was Wednesday through Saturday. If you are not a school based team, how do you plan on not having the students marked as absent for 3 days with no excuse?
This strikes me as over the top. I suggest you politely bring this up with the administration, possibly with the support of mentors/parents. I presume that if a student brought a personal laptop to school, they would not need to get permission to take it home. If theft is a problem there, then some controls might be necessary, but if there is an agreed system for marking personal and school property, there should be reasonable compromise that can be agreed.
All that said, I think you should think carefully about what you would like the final setup to be. Write down the issues, possible solutions and desires, etc. Work it over a few times with mentors and especially the teachers. Then take it to the principal and/or school committee.
This doesn’t have to be a full split from the school. There are a lot of school-based teams that have build spaces - and even full-size fields - at a mentoring company’s location. Or at an independent shared location sponsored by a mentoring organization, like the MEZ in Detroit. You might look into those options.
Yeah, this situation is definitely familiar to me, which is why I suggested finding teachers who are willing to take mentoring on as a hobby rather than as a job. Obviously, it’s not always possible to do that. The teacher’s perspective is fair, too – from their perspective, they’re doing you a favor by staying at all, which is probably where the resentment comes from.
I would suggest that for now, you might figure out a way to get in-person meetings down to two hours per day. You may find that, as we did with people putting in less hours this year, it’s still possible to finish everything you need to, while reducing load on the teachers.
I would be willing to bet that for a multitude of reasons, they won’t give the room to you for free as a non profit. We asked for something similar from our school for weekend meetings, and what we got in response was basically that if the teacher isn’t there, the school can’t ask the district for the reduced rate they get for weekday meetings.
Either way, I would strongly suggest talking to the school and district about your plan before going too much deeper into planning this stuff.
Overall, it looks like you’ve at least thought about and addressed a lot of my concerns, so I’m definitely less worried for you now, haha.
Totally agree here, and as I mentioned earlier, try to get the school admin to understand the value of the program. It’s a really valuable skill to be able to formulate an argument in terms of what the other side wants. In this case, think about what the school admin’s priorities are (OP, you know this better than I do for your own school). For us, the school’s reputation is a big factor, in addition to the admin genuinely caring about academic outcomes. Then, the argument from our side is that by having an adequately supported FRC team, we become more competitively viable, leading to 1) increased reputation and 2) more recruitment of students onto the team who were not initially interested in STEM.
It seems that the difficulties you are experiencing mostly revolve around “school district policies”. Do other students and mentors have the same opinion regarding those policies? Have you discussed with other Surrey BC teams how they handle the school district policies? A search of The Blue Alliance shows 8 other teams currently active in Surrey BC.
We have permission to be supervised by one FRC appointed mentor if need be, but he had to go through a lengthy criminal background check to make it happen. And even then they were being generous by allowing that. I do not think this will continue for the coming years should be stay a school club.
We rely on their insurance, yes. But I believe the Non Profit we want to re associate with will have its own insurance as well.
We need a list of students going, their medical forms being sent in, their trip fees being sent in, along with receipts of hotel and transport arrangements. All this is processed by the school district and then the field trip is given approval. We also need to fill in TOCs, which costs a lot. (teachers get paid for the amount of time they are supervising us on the field trip. Every teacher is usually a cost of 2 - 3K Canadian given a 3 day competition stay).
Yes, and we agree with that, but on school property. Now, they wont be able to force us to only work on school, and not take our tools out. So if we need extra time, with approval from the Non Profit org we can move to a students garage or shop to finish up with parent supervisors (not permitted at the moment).
That would be great, because at the moment we never even know with certainty that the club account has enough money to pay for stuff. The school decides to pay certain bills at undisclosed times using our money and students have no say in it whatsoever, which caused students to collectively lose 2k last year without being reimbursed.
We get 5 hours a week. Which was this year. Which was the most we’ve had and definitely will not have next year. We are okay with this, but provided we can work outside in our own time too. Its frustrating to raise 12000 towards this program as a group of 60 kids and then make a rc car for a competition.
We don’t really need a teacher to supervise. Yes, while on school facility, we will take whatever we get. But it would be nice to have the option to move out if needed.
To be fair, no they are not. Although the issue is because it is a school activity, therefore any injuries or issues arising at a students home make the school liable. As such they do not support this idea. And I do agree with this philosophy, I just dont find it sustainable. Which is why essentially my goal is to continue the program in school as close to previous years as I can, without making the school liable. If we are just an external org using their space (hopefully for free), then they get to keep the program, have a large student base, and not worry about paperwork. We will deal with the medical and administrative responsibilities. Also this does not put strain on the teachers to commit for the entirety of the build season. They can give us what they can, and we can work with that because now we wont be just limited to those hours.
I do agree here, definitely have to sort this out with the school. But we wish to store it at the school itself. There is definitely space. Again the goal is to rid them of the paperwork, and rid them of the need to be legally liable for us.
Excuse is the competition. Paperwork to be filed is now and Extended leave form instead of a extended field study form. A lot simpler, we just state where we r going, show parental consent to miss school, and how long we r gone for. Its like calling in sick for 4 days.
Would your students still have an “excused” (or similar worded) absence if you weren’t following this process as an external non-profit. I would assume the administration is still going to require some of, if not all of these, even if the trip itself is being organized by an external organization, if you want to comply with the attendance policy.
Yes, but the school still remains liable since it is a school club which puts all those restrictions in place. If we can somehow reverse the scenario, where we are an external group using the school facility, we can work in the relative safety of school and not worry about district regulations since it is not a school affiliated activity.
We get 2 hours per day 3 days a week. On a good week, that is. Really isn’t much of an ask in my opinion. Teachers are willing to stay, they just don’t want to sponsor as this would be a lot of paperwork.
We want to work with the teachers. We really enjoy our school atmosphere and I really dont wanna see 6458 completed abondoning it. But we also want to have the power to move our robot to a students garage if need me, which we absolutely lack right now. If we only get 4 hours a week within the school, we are okay with that. But, as a non school entity, we can plan external meetings, move our tools wherever we wish, and make purchases on our own. This makes the school district vestigial and therefore we don’t have to abide by their regulations, at least when we are off their property.
A laptop no. But lets say a cordless drill or a screwdriver then yes. And I believe for the upcoming years they event want us to ask for permission to bring tools. Again, the reasoning behind this is clearly safety - they want to make sure the student bringing a reciprocating saw will be safe. But this, the massive lag time with paperwork, the limited time we get in school and the prohibition of working elsewhere… it is now just impossible.
No, I do not believe so. An extended leave form is the same as that of a private vacation during the school year. It isn’t even sent to district, the school is allowed to process it itself. It would be the same as a cadets trip or a soccer club tour. Perhaps they will make an exception and require more work from us since 30 of their kids r going missing at one time, but at the very least they can not stop us. Its just a matter of attendance.
