Help Save Team 306 CRT

FIRST General Forum
1

My team, CIA Team 291 from Erie, PA, posted this video on YouTube in support of our sister team, Corry (PA) Robotics Team (FRC 306). Our goal is to spread the word about CRT’s current situation and increase the view count such that Ellen DeGeneres might feature the video on her show.

Please check this video out and share it freely - the first part of the video doubles as a nice overview of FIRST and its guiding principles. We also have a Facebook page setup that shows a little bit more about their team.

We realize that the goal of FIRST is to spread STEM and Make it Loud but we can’t just stand around and watch other existing teams go under simply because of funding.

Thank you so much for your support!

Video
Faceboook Page

2

Thank you for sharing this. It hurts me to know teams don’t get to compete because of funds… I’ve seen this happen too often, and I would love to help prevent another case. If there’s any way I can help, other than spreading the word, please let me know.

3

It would be helpful to hear their story from them either in this thread or a new one. There is no mention of having money issues on their website. There are a lot of sponsors on their website. Did they all go away?

There is plenty of time to raise the funds for next year if the students want to. There is money out there. It has to be a group effort. Here are some ideas that needs the entire team involved.

  • We held multiple cans shakes showing off the robot and the program. A four hour can shake netted us up to $1000.00.
  • Car washes are 100% profit. Do one at Halloween with the students dressed in costumes.
  • Sell “Shares” in the team. For $306 (nice reason for a low team number) someone get a “share”. The shares get your name on the robot.
  • Reach out to alumni. The team has been in business for 15 seasons. Ask the alumni to give something back.

The team needs a realistic budget goal. Get together and decide how much money you really need. Be realistic when it comes to next years robot. Don’t build what you can’t afford.

4

Has something happened in the town or school district that prompted this outreach? I see that the team has steadily been attending 2 regionals for quite some time now. Did they lose sponsors or community support all of a sudden?

edit: John already posted my thoughts.

5

They have been completely cut off from their school district. They are currently fighting to have a place to build next year and even get their team number from the district (they are reluctant to give it up)

6

Absolutely. They need to tell their story. They have a great history. Use it!!! Work with the school district to see what can be done. If they will give space and no funding, then go with it. See what can be worked out.

If nothing happens then contact the local paper, tell them the story. Articles in the paper generate lots of interest…

The important thing is that they have to want it.

7

Thanks for the ideas! We just wanted to get this started early after seeing what happened to 188 last year

8

Do you know causation for this?

Districts usually don’t just randomly cut a program for no reason. (unless its just money related) Are they cutting the team’s workspace for a reason?

More information would be helpful here. Priority 1 should be working things out with the school board and finding out what is possible and what limitations the team can still operate with. Also need to know what exactly they lose this year in terms of resources if they are cut out of the district.

9

I will never understand what prompts an entity to keep a FIRST Robotics team number.

10

The district is in debt and has lost faith in the team. They had to cut something and this is what they chose. They are currently without a huge chunk of their funding and are going to have to work extra hard to make up that deficit. We just want to get the word out there

11

How is the workspace being cut though? Are teachers at the school being laid off from shop classes or whoever mentors the team? Does the school have a workshop that they are shutting down/selling off machines from?

Why do they need a new workspace is what I’m getting at.

Money is easy, especially if they just cut their 2nd event from their budget (but they should be able to raise enough for two events still). Workspaces are much harder to come by and entail a lot more effort IMO.

12

Can we get more info on this? What does it mean? Are they concerned that the team is not winning? When people don’t understand what the program does, they judge it on the win/loss record. STUDENTS need to let the district know what they get from the program. The alumni need to explain what the program did for them. The parents need to explain to the district what the program does for their children.

Work it!! You have 15 years of stories to tell.

13

Do teams generally receive funding from their school district? Is this common practice?

The only thing my team receives from the school district is the right to exist, participate in school activities, and affiliate with the district schools (i.e. participate in parades, extracurricular activity demonstrations, and meet on school property). No actual $$$ given.

14

Hello everyone! My name is Samantha Adams, I am the co-captain and acting PR person for CRT 306. There are a lot of questions you all are asking that we’re still asking ourselves. We will be able to give more solid answers after our meeting with the superintendent tomorrow as well as after our school board meeting on May 20th. However I will try and give as much information as we know right now so please bear with me.

The school had cut our funding in half a few years ago and helped pay for one regional. Through fundraising and sponsors the team was always able to pay for a second event and it worked out well. This year the school gave that funding back and the team was so in awe. Last year we graduated 11 seniors and those seniors were our main core kids. They were our main machinists, programmer, CAD designer; they were the center of our team. We started over this year with no seniors, over half the team were rookies, and those of us that weren't had barely touched the robot. Having the funding back made getting into the robot and task a lot better for all of us. About two and a half weeks into build season the school came to us and told us that half of our budget we had thought we had, was now gone. The team was devastated. Emily, our captain, and myself sat the team down and told them our priority was the robot. We asked them to leave the money problems to us for right now. Her and I went out to the community and talked to all of our sponsors. 
A little about our city first: we come from a small town with a school district population of about 7,000 give or take. We have many small businesses, family run shops, but very few big companies. This is why you see so many sponsors on our website and our shirts, because we have many small businesses giving us $25 or discounts.
Through talking to our community members we were able to raise $7,000 in about three weeks, used most of our budget we had left over from past fundraisers and were able to attend the Cincinnati Regional, which we rode to with CIA 291. Normally we would've gone to Cleveland because it is closer but the high school Marching Band trip was supposed to be that same weekend. Half of our team and most of our drive team are in the marching band and since the trip only happens every three years, they would've gone to that instead. During the trip to Cincinnati members of CIA overheard us talking about what had happened to us and started asking questions. We were honest with them and told them everything we knew and that was the following:

1. Our funding had been cut in half, three weeks into build season.
2. We kept getting the run around for a reason as to why.
3. We were taken off the yearly budget for the 2013-2014 school year.
4. We were ready to fight for what we loved.

Obviously they became very concerned and took it upon themselves to help us. We didn’t know anything about what was being done for us until I received an e-mail asking if we would mind them trying to help.

We are a 15 year veteran team that has been proud to say our school has been our main supporter. All the members of our team work hard every year during our many fundraisers and events to spread the message of FIRST and the message of our team. We are trying our best but are working with large restrictions. Some of you have asked why we don’t have anything on our website, or why we don’t write something in the paper and that’s because living in a small town like we do news travels… Fast. If we say something on our website or in the paper that is the same as sentencing our team to death. We have to be very careful about how we word anything that goes in the paper or gets shown to the public because otherwise the movers and shakers in our school district spread the word that we are “rude, arrogant, and ungrateful”. We can’t go near the public eye to much until we get a definite answer from the school as to what they are going to do with us. Also the school is trying to transition from FIRST to RoboBots which is a battle bots program because it is cheaper.

For those of you that have read threw this whole thing, thank you. I will keep dropping in with updates as often as I can but please know we are trying our best. We are active in the community with Relay for Life, different community wide events and parades. Fundraisers are done year round but with so many sports programs it’s hard to compete against them all. I play soccer for our school so I see the support from both sports and academics. All we’re asking is that you all please share the video, give us your support through words on our Facebook wall, likes, anything. We are trying to show the community that we are a program worth keeping because if the school kicks us out we’ll have something to make a response with.

Anymore questions, concerns, or just advice please feel free to e-mail us: [email protected]
Address it to Sam and I’ll be happy to answer. Thank you all.

15

Also as for the work space problem it is because they want to use our room for storage. And when I said small town, our city limits is about 3 miles by 3 miles.

16

Samanthaa,
Thanks for the clarifications. It helps knowing more about what is going on.

It will be interesting to hear what the situation is after your upcoming meetings. Do what ever you can to work with the. You don’t want to burn any bridges, but do not be afraid of them or what they might do if you take your story public.

If they will give you space and allow you to exist, then great. Thank them for what they can do. The important thing is to remain in business.

If they won’t fund you, work the community to get the funding. Our school district is last in the state for per student funding. We work around it.

I question the Robobots direction you suggest they want to go in. It seems to be a very localized program. Perhaps there is funding that you are not aware of if they choose that program. IMO Vex or FTC would be a better choice if funding is the issue.

Good luck, Keep posting.

17

Thank you so much and it’s not a problem. We are happy to answer or give any clarifications that will help.

18

I’d never heard of RoboBots1 before, so I looked it up. It’s not cheaper. It’s an arms race.

Although the cost constraints in FRC do stifle some forms of innovation, they enable teams of modest means to compete on a similar level. Not so with that event. With sufficiently generous sponsors, you can straightforwardly outspend your way to victory. Another thing that makes it an arms race is the rather wide latitude teams are given to construct the robots.2 The thing keeping it from getting out of control seems to be the modest means/aspirations of the participants—and there’s no guarantee the opponents will be that way for long.

Perhaps maybe an avenue worth exploring is a quick cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to participate in competitive robotics. I think you could make a fair case that to achieve competitive success, FRC is cheaper overall, and that per unit of educational success FRC is cheaper too. Then again, you should probably consider VRC too—measured in outcomes per dollar, it makes a compelling case against FRC, albeit with a lower ceiling.

Layoffs and cuts aren’t the only impetus for shutting down a program; it could come down to the perceived value of the program versus alternatives.

Although I don’t know about 306’s school district (and its debt), some school districts are financially incompetent, and have placed themselves in a desperate situation. (That’s actually a discussion I’d like to have—the merits of various school funding mechanisms, the rate of return of the improvements/programs they enable, and the risks of underperforming and saddling the next generation of taxpayers with a disproportionate burden.)

Or perhaps it’s the opposite: they’re competent despite the debt, and they’ve done the math and realized that 306 is not benefiting the community enough. (I’d be skeptical of that—based on my experience, you’d be hard-pressed to beat the rate of return of a well-established FRC team in a district lacking in similar extracurricular opportunities. But admittedly, I’m estimating based on anecdote, rather than systematically studying the problem.)

1 Is that redundant?
2 Rules are here and here. It’s hard to have a credible ban on hazardous materials when you allow rotating weapons with no kinetic energy limit, pressurized gas at 853 lb/in2, and unlimited battery capacity and chemical energy storage. (As long as it doesn’t use them as a weapon or in an internal combustion engine. I’d like to see a team employ some sort of external combustion engine, perhaps out of spite. And a hydrazine-powered turbine would be even more fun, but despite the lax regulation, that would be hard to justify on account of safety…)

19

When our team realized that they needed more money, we set up a slide show and practiced a presentation for new sponsors. I think only 2 - 3 companies didnt give us anything

20

As one of the lead mentors for a team that is not connected to a district or any major sponsor I know where 306 is coming from. Our team (3999-Shadetree Mechanics) was formed with the intention of allowing any student from any district(or Home School) to compete.
Our school district does not fund our team or even recognize its existence. For the first year I raised over $25000 through grants and fund raising. That number got cut almost half in the second year. It looks like we will be losing 3 major sponsors this year as well. While we may be able to replace some of the funds we will have to ramp up fund raising to cover the expense of going to a second regional in 2014. In the first 2 years we were only able to attend 1 regional. We have the entrance fee ready for the first regional in our account and we will start fund raising for the second one knowing that we need to raise about $4000.
The team is in the process of securing some new sponsors for the coming year. I can tell you that it is much easier and more palatable to a sponsor to let them know that any donation will help. 10 sponsors at $500 per year will insure that you have enough to attend at least 1 event. Please let me know if there is any way we can help as we go through what you are going through now on a daily basis.