We are team 1359 a rookie( placed 2nd at Portland regional qualifications) We are a Boys Scouts Venture Crew. We are not sponsored by a school. I was wondering how many other teams are not school sponsored? Whether or not you have found not being school affiliated a positive or negative thing? Just curious.
the team im on isnt sponsored by a school, out main sponsor is DuPont and i feel that havin a team that is made up of alot of different schools is better because u form friendships with kids that you probably wouldnt have meet if you werent in robotics with them 
Just out of curiosity, how is recruiting done? How did you find out about this city-wide team?
How is absence from school handled?
Team 125 is a melting pot of Boston schools.
Our high school kids are from several Boston area high schools, mostly Boston Latin and Brookline high schools.
Lately we have been having difficulty recruiting high school kids and we will lose some very valuable kids due to graduation this year. The high schools haven’t supported the team all that much this year. With one notable exception, a teacher from Boston Latin has helped out quite a bit this year.
Our corporate sponsor is Textron Systems. They’re around to make sure our college student ideas stay grounded in reality. Our head guy George, who is from Textron cracks the whip and tries to keep things on schedule.
Our college sponsor Northeastern University’s College of Engineering provides an excellent lab enviroment for us to use. We have an office, large lab, computer room, and machine shop. Which they even plan to re-model giving us more room in the coming year. Most of the mentors are engineering students at Northeastern. Two professors also help out a great deal on the team.
Myself, I’m actually a computer engineering student from Northeastern’s next door neighbor Wentworh Institute of Technology. We don’t have a team at my school. The Northeastern team takes in everyone who will put forth effort on their team.
We have presentations of our robot and team at different high schools, museums, and other activities with teenagers there. We go everywhere we can to try and make our team known. The students on my team come from 14 different highschools, both public and private, and from 3 different states, so we come from all over. Most of the time people find out through word of mouth, although MOE has been in the newspaper a few times. As for the absences, we each get a permission slip that states the days we will be missing school, and we need to get both our parents and a school official (principal, dean of students, etc) to sign it.
Being on a team with such diversity has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on how you look at it. We do have the travel and permission issue, and there are some students from arch rival schools who need to work together ;-), but I absolutly love it. We always have so many different views on problems, and so many different backgrounds. I am the only person from my entire school on the team, so it was amazing to meet around 35 completly new people who liked the same thing I did.
Hope that helps 
Team 891 is a melting-pot team. We draw through the district vocational school students from the four city high schools…some more than others.
While we’re technically sponsored by the school district as a whole we’re somewhat separated from the schools in that none of the high schools themselves are direct participants in the program - the two teachers are from the vocational school for us, along with engineers from SRC and some college students, myself included in the latter group.