Questions: Support From Your School (Financial & Other)

Competition Fundraising
#1

Hello fellow FRC teams,

On Thursday I will have the opportunity to educate our team’s school board about our team and its operations. In my presentation, I am hoping to present specific numbers having to do with the costs that come with running an FRC team, as well as their part in our successes.

I feel that more education about other teams would potentially help my case to generate more support, and was wondering if the FRC community could help me out. If there are teams out there that would be willing to share the following information with me, either publicly or via PM, please respond. Your assistance is greatly appreciated!

  1. Is your school public or private?
  2. How many years has your team been in existence?
  3. What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)?
  4. What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school?
  5. Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many?
  6. Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC?
  7. Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours?
  8. What does your team do for your school?

Thanks in advance for your responses!

#2

1810 is a cross district team. We have 31 students from one high school, and 5 from the other. I happen to be one of those five. We also presented to our school board early March. It was a great success (had 350 people there due to another controversey in our district)

Is your school public or private: Public
How many years has your team been in existence? This is our 10th year
What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)? **Facilites: We get 1 dedicated build room/workshop, and two other large classrooms to use during meetings. We also get support and reconiziton from our district. **
What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school? I don’t exactly know, figuring 5,000/regional, 2,000/robot, 1,500/food + transportation. (this is just a really rough guess) However, not much if any However, 12,000 - 17,000 is a accurate estimate. See this thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76604
Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many? I do not think so.
Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC? We just have a FRC team. We might be starting a FLL team at a elementary school sometime soon.
Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours? We have a few classes with VEX kits, nothing real advanced. Nope. Our team is entirely outside of school hours
What does your team do for your school?We make a few fun projects, such as a T-Shirt cannon robot… people like that. Its also a great thing to say that you have a strong robotics team, draws people into the district.

#3

Is your school public or private?

  • Private

How many years has your team been in existence?

  • 9 seasons

What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)?

  • Sporadic money for tools. New facilities (2 years old), designed by team mentors and built for the team, and the engineering, and physics classes.

What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school?

  • This year (June-June), we had total expenses (both cash and in-kind donations) around 30k. One thing to remember, on your balance sheet for the team, in-kind donations get placed at cost in both the income and expense categories - otherwise you don’t have a true picture of everything you get and spend. If you lose a sponsor who did a bunch of in-kind stuff, you’ll still have the expense of buying whatever they had been giving you! I’m not entirely sure how much of that comes from the school, but not much. About 1/3 is in-kind donations, another 1/3 came from large corporate sponsors, and the last 1/3 was a combination of student fees and other small donations.

Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many?

  • Yes. The school provides a stipend for (I think) two individuals.

Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC?

  • We have an FLL team, and are working on getting an FTC team started. The FLL team was started when our FRC team paid all of the fees their first year, and the school has picked it up since.

Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours?

  • No. However, as a result of the FRC team, the school has started up classes in programming and engineering.

What does your team do for your school?

  • One of the biggest things we do is recruitment. The new STEM Center at the school is a major draw, and when prospective families are given tours often a team member will jump out to lead the tour in the space (anything to skip class, right? :p). I’ve heard (anecdotal, but hopefully accurate) that the team has played a major part of some students decision to come to the school. Of course, there was also the design of the STEM Center - they were going to have 3 large classrooms, until we helped them redesign it into a truly awesome space.

The school administration has always been really supportive of the team. Simply put, we’ve been very fortunate to have a couple of major donors over the years, such that we haven’t needed very much money from the school directly. Instead, the administration comes to visit us, they support the students getting out of school for competition, and while it took a few years (big projects always do!), they got us a killer space at the school, one of the best build spaces in the state!

#4

our budget is around $15K. We have run our program as an after school activity for 7 years and as a class + after school activity for the last 2. Unfortunately, our shop teacher is retiring this year and there are no plans to fill his job, so we are back to the after school activity mode (if we don’t go 4-H, it’s still up in the air.)
We only run FRC, have started 2 FLL teams, but they failed after a few years, because there were no adults available to keep them going.
Because adult help is in short supply, we concentrate instead on doing electronics and other recycling…in 4 years, we have diverted approx. 40 tons from the dump, and 1/4 of that was e-waste. we refurbish computers, office furniture, etc. and sell it (we do all of our own fundraising…the school supplies us with a room - last 2 years a Perkins grant-funded shop teacher.)
Our robotics kids also serve as school technology aides and have saved the school tens of thousands of dollars in tech repair calls.

#5

I would suggest that you focus on the success of students going on to pursue higher education and how you would use new money, instead of telling them other schools get X and we should too.

#6

Survey sent for Team 4276 privately. After you see it, you will agree it’s best not used as a model for your school ::ouch::

#7

I forgot to mention in my previous post, that 1810 did present at our board meeting a little over a month ago. It was a huge sucess! There was around 350 people at the meeting for another issue, but we started out the meeting.

Let me first say, we weren’t asking for money, or facilites. We were just trying to raise awareness for our program. For example, our facilites are at our overpopulated school. If they need to take our build room away for a classroom, we beleive that it will be a harder decision, because they know we are there.

We got around 7 minutes on the agenda, and used all of it. Our parents created a presentation, and then selected team members to read off slides of the power point. We also had one of our major sponsors talk about the importance of our program.

http://youtu.be/RYCH5rG3HWg (video of our presentation)

1 Like
#8

Is your school public or private? Public

How many years has your team been in existence? Around 16 years

What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)? http://www.brrsd.k12.nj.us/files/3080/tentative%20budget%20-%202015-2016.pdf See pages 38, 39, and 40. We are also hoping for an increase in the number of paid stipends

What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school? The link above should answer your second question but for more info on the total budget you’ll have to contact RAMP our parent organization. Their website is http://www.team303ramp.com/

Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many? Yes currently one, hoping for more next year

Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC? Our middle school has their own FLL team which recieves some support from our own budget. For example last year we donated a few EV3 kits. We have 4 FTC teams at the high-school which are all organized and funded by 303.

Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours? No

What does your team do for your school? **We host the Bridgewater district event at our high-school. We make presentations to the board a few times during the year about our team and our impact on the school and country. We appear at most if not all science fairs and the like at the lower level schools. We host the Middle School Technical Design challenge at our middle school, and much more. **

#9

Answering for 2667, Knights of the Valley.

  1. Is your school public or private?
    Public. 1. How many years has your team been in existence?
    8 years 1. What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)?
    Access to the shop, a closet to store our stuff. 1. What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school?
    Tight. Really tight. The only time the school gives us money is if we qualify for Champs, which hasn’t happened since 2010. I don’t have direct access to the financial data, but most of the money we spent on our robot this year was in the mecanum wheels. 1. Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many?
    We have a paid faculty adviser. He gets a small bonus-- this is a similar bonus for any other club. 1. Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC?
    There isn’t a distinct “district” robotics program-- we have four FRC teams in our district and they manage their own FTC/FLL programs, in addition to basement teams in the area. Our school has a single FTC team, 9205, which is operated entirely separately from the FRC team and does all their own fundraising. They’re actually in a better position financially than the FRC team is at our school, but they do a lot more fundraising and outreach. 1. Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours?
    No. 1. What does your team do for your school?
    Any trophies or banners we win are given to the school and displayed with athletic teams. We also do demonstrations for the school at a variety of events.
#10

This information for Team 423:

  1. Public
  2. This is our 10th year
  3. Our school gives us about $1500/year (maybe a little more if we get to champs) and a room in the basement
  4. The team budget is very minimal (a few thousand dollars). It’s barely enough to afford the competitions and to build a robot.
  5. The school provides two, low-paying jobs for the team: one mentor and one advisor. Both of our previous job holders gave up the job this year to attract two new mentors (which kind of worked).
  6. The district has 2 FLL teams, one at our 5-6 school and one at our 7-8 school. We don’t have a very good retention rate to the high-school team (maybe 2 kids/year). We are sending kids over to try to help improve them (myself being one of them).
  7. No and no (it would be nice though).
  8. We show off at pep-rallies and other school gatherings.
#11

Is your school public or private? We are a public school district–three public high schools, a charter school and home school students. But we operate under the guidelines of the public school district.

How many years has your team been in existence? 18

What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)? We are required to have stipend paid teachers at all meetings so the district pays for the stipends for the three teachers. We have a building/shed that was donated by a sponsor that sits on school property. The district pays for any insurance or utility bills for that building. Students are allowed to participate at tournaments with excused absences.

What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school? We are a large team, 70 students this year, and our budget for this year is $126,000. We do not receive any funds from our school district. The budget is roughly 40% from sponsors/fundraisers, 60% from student contributions.

Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many? We are required to have teachers (see above) but we have to find the teachers. We are VERY fortunate that we now have STEM-related teachers from each of the three public high schools. But we’ve had years where we’ve used elementary school teachers who were parents or even a school secretary in order to fulfill the stipend teacher requirement.

Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC? We have FLL teams in each of our elementary schools and middle schools. We worked with a local foundation, the Education Foundation of Martin County, who wrote grants to fund the program. Each school team works differently as to how they provide for students in their schools. Some use it through the after-school program and some use it through their gifted students program. As a team, we provide student mentors to assist the schools. But FLL is funded outside the district. FTC teams are currently organized outside the school district (4H, Boy Scouts, Civil Air Patrol).

Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours? FRC is not offered as a school program. Due to our structure, we are an evening and weekends extracurricular program.

What does your team do for your school? We support our schools in their STEM efforts through robot demonstrations. But because our team is from each school, we don’t do a lot at the schools that is directly for the schools.

We made a presentation to our school board just last month. We are truly trying to shift the paradigm that STEM isn’t something left for whatever grants can be received but should be a priority of the curriculum and the budget. We have outgrown our building and have sought help from the private sector and the public sector (local government). We are now seeking help from the school district for additional space. We are seeking options as to availability. It’s a long process, but we’re in it for the long haul.

If we can help further in any way, please feel free to reach out to us. We’re happy to share the budget, the building plans or whatever information you may need to make your case. We would appreciate if you could share the results of your meeting as well.

We can be reached at frcteam180@gmail.com.

Thank you and good luck. nzp

#12

1. Is your school public or private?
Public

2. How many years has your team been in existence?
14 Years

3. What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)?
We have a classroom, workspace, and several tool rooms dedicated solely to the robotics team. We also share a large machine shop with the Machine Tools and Engineering classes.

4. What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school?
We get roughly $15k per year from our primary sponsor which covers all costs including registration, robot build, tools, and travel expenses. The school does not (and cannot, due to budget constraints) support us financially.

5. Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many?
Our team coach taught at the school until a few years ago, when she retired, she offered to continue coaching the team. She was not, and is not paid for coaching the team as far as I know.

6. Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC?
There are at least a few FLL teams in the district, they recieve their funding either through the FIRST in Michigan state grant program or through our local FIRST 501c3 organization, “FIRST of the Great Lakes Bay Region”.

7. Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours?
Our school has an Engineering / Project Lead the Way course that is mentored by our teams former coach. There is no direct correlation to the FRC program, though several of the students on our team are also in the class.

8. What does your team do for your school?
As our school is a Career Center, we do not have a “native” student body, and instead pull 11th and 12th grade students from schools around the area for half-day programs at our school. Since this requires recruiting students from these other schools, the team has frequently brought our robots to recruitment events and open houses that our school has put on. The team also recruits members from schools throughout the area, and many of the students who join the team from other schools end up attending our school in their 11th and 12th grade years after their experience with the team.

Additionally, we recently rebuilt the display/trophy case in our schools front lobby as it had been full of outdated information on its display and was falling apart due to poor construction. It now prominently features our team logo (which we are working to make the schools mascot, as it doesn’t currently have one), and space for trophies from all the schools programs (though, admittedly, most of them are from the robotics team).

#13

Is your school public or private? Public school
How many years has your team been in existence? 4 years
What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)? We’re allowed to use half of a physics classroom for our workshop, and the district has hindered the attempts for us to build a small workshop on campus, or to be included in the new building currently being built.
What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school? A large part of our budget is contributed by the school alumni association. Our budget is for 1 or 2 off season competitions, an inner team robotics competition (Our team splits into groups and builds small scale robots for a competition), and then regionals and the robots (practice and competition)…
Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many? There are two teachers for our school’s robotics course. 1 is a computer science teacher and the other is a physics teacher. Both only have one course of robotics and the rest are normal.
Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC? There are multiple FLL teams in our district, mostly supported by us but I’m not sure about funding.
Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours? We have a two year robotics course. Year one is an intro to programming and electronics. Year two is for veteran members and we use this class to work on FRC related stuff (Build season, off season, etc.).
What does your team do for your school? Bring home the occasional award for the trophy case, demonstrate at some school functions, working on a t-shirt cannon for school rallies. Lots of computer repair and stuff is done by our team, and we work on the odd project or something for like theater or journalism.

If you have other questions, or need me to clarify something just ask or shoot me a PM

#14

Is your school public or private? We are a “community” team, not affiliated with any one school. Our students come primarily from two rival high schools, but also from surrounding public and private schools. We also have several homeschooled students on our team.

How many years has your team been in existence? 8 years.

What support does your school or district give to your team (money, facilities, other donations)? Our school board donates money to MARS, and also recently provided a practice building. We do not meet regularly at the practice building (still meet at WVU), but we put a field in there, and also run some summer events there. MARS has to pay for upkeep, maintenance, renovations, and utilities; and when we got it, it needed some MAJOR overhauls. We have pumped several thousand dollars into the building, but thanks to the generous donation from the school board, we didn’t have to buy it or pay rent :slight_smile: This is by far the biggest donation. They also provide access to the middle school next to the building to run outreach events, FLL practices, and open house events.

What does your overall team budget look like? What portion of that budget is contributed by your school? MARS operates on a budget of approximately $65,000 per year. The Board of Education contributes in cash approximately $6,000 (depending on the year). A lot of this money goes back into paying for FLL events, FLL teams, registrations, etc. Our team budget pays for student/mentor travel, hotel rooms, outreach events, building maintenance, etc. in addition to the “robot stuff” and registration fees.

Does the school provide faculty and/or co-curricular paid positions for the team? If so, how many? No. We have been trying to make this happen for FLL, and we were met with adamant opposition. We will keep trying, though! It’s a dream of ours. But all of our FRC mentors are volunteers.

Does your district have FLL/FTC teams as well? How are those funded/supported in relation to FRC? Yes, there are numerous FLL teams at the various elementary/middle schools in our area as well as several private teams. There is one FTC team at a middle school, but I admittedly am unsure about the funding stream for this team. I do know that they are not drowning in cash, though. They have to raise much of their funds (if not all) on their own. MARS assists in funding several of the FLL teams, but some of the individual schools also contribute to the school-based teams.

Does your school have a robotics course or series of programs? Is FRC worked on during these hours? No. We do not do robotics at all during regular school hours. Again, a dream of ours, and it is happening at the middle school FLL level, but not yet for FRC.

What does your team do for your school? Because we are not a recognized school activity (we are a school board activity, but the individual schools have traditionally been reluctant to recognize MARS), there is not a whole lot we can do for the two main high schools. We have participated in several events throughout the years such as career fairs, student org fairs, homecoming, etc.

Hope this helps!

#15
  1. Slidell High is a public school
  2. This is 3946’s fourth year in existence and competition. The school did have a previous team (2182) for about 2 years.
  3. Until a few weeks ago, essentially just build and practice space (a large science classroom that is a classroom as well as our build and storage space, and a section of parking lot.) and field trip permission. When we won a trip to championships, they chipped in the entry fee. We are working to expand our facilities and funding our head coach similar to sports teams, but we’re not there yet.
  4. We have about a $20-$30k budget, which essentially doubled this year with a $9k donation from Ingersoll Rand to buy and outfit a trailer, and the fund raising biltz to pay for championships. Only our championship entry fee was paid by the school board. Oh, yes, our head coach gets $200 a year bonus, same as if he were heading up a chess club.
  5. Working on that - currently $200 per year for the head coach.
  6. No districts here. Some middle schools have FLL - we’re mentoring a couple, and provide half the staff for a regional FLL tournament and a quarter of the staff for the LA state FLL tourney. FTC just started in Louisiana this year - we haven’t been involved yet.
  7. We have a single one-semester robotics course that’s based on the BOE-bot, offered once every two or three years. Not directly related to FRC.
  8. We work with the football team on publicity via our air cannon, keep up a garden area, provide a great meeting ground for students of every description. We’re looking to enhance our connection with the football team next year by bringing the air cannon to road games and also providing some trailer transportation for the football team. We repaired our school’s “Slidell Pelican” last year when it was vandalized, and do lots of little things around and about.
#16