Well, you’ve certainly tipped over the game board! Hope all the pieces get put back into helpful spots. Not a tactic that is generally recommended, but when facing an extinction level event no risks are unreasonable.
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Update: All the publicity has stirred community engagement. The district is in the hot seat and has agreed to meet with us for a discussion on Monday, 6/24 following their board meeting.
As a point of clarity for anyone that may be following the public story or public announcements from the involved parties, FIRST and FIRST in Michigan has nothing to do with the cause of our situation and has been nothing but supportive in getting all of us to the table to talk.
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Hi Jim, I would just like to clarify when this meeting is happening for those of us who would like to attend. Is the board meeting from 8:30-9:30 with the discussion to follow? Should we arrive at 9:30 then or do we need to be there for the whole meeting?
Thanks - Go GEARS!
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The board meeting is from 8:30-9:30. There is a period at which the public can address the board. Normal board etiquette and procedures apply, but any comments are added to the minutes for the public. We recommend if you will read a statement, to also submit a written version of it. The follow-up meeting that the district agreed to is not a public meeting, it is between NC GEARS, the district, and a couple school superintendents. This meeting is at 3:30PM at the same location. I cannot speak to the agenda or outcomes of that meeting yet since we do not know.
The policies related to board meetings are here: https://z2policy.ctspublish.com/luskalbertson/browse/newaygoset/newaygo/z20000009
The agenda for the upcoming meeting is here:
Public comment is near the beginning of the meeting, which starts at 8:30AM.
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As someone who has been through almost this exact experience in the last few years, I’ll start by saying it does get better! The first year is hard, but it sounds like you have a dedicated mentor and student base, similar to ours, and that is all that it takes to power through.
We found out that we were splitting around the same time of the year and were also lucky enough to have just incorporated our own nonprofit (we had a bit of a hunch that the day was coming).
We got a very limited amount of our property back, and it was done by providing receipts indicating that someone other than the school district purchased the items. In that vein, I would be prepared during this meeting to provide a list of requests, as well as make sure you’re able to provide evidence of ownership for the items you are trying to retrieve, as specifically as possible.
We heavily leaned on our district leadership to help us through, both in making introductions to possible new partners in the community as well as to serve as a more impartial liaison to our former school district (we were trying to negotiate a workspace in another school within the district rather than leaving entirely). FIM may be able to help serve in the same role for you.
We applied for larger grants than normal with something of an emergency plea and were relatively successful in these requests. Our longest term sponsors were the biggest supporters and most increased their giving, including some that even doubled their donations for our rebuild year. We communicated clearly and briefly as early as possible after the separation to all of our sponsors in the form of a brief and carefully drafted email where we did not air any dirty laundry, instead factually stating that we would have increased operating expenses because we were going independent and that we hoped that we could rely on them to support our newly formed nonprofit. We also emphasized the benefits of running a team independently when we communicated the change.
We invested time in making sure we were out in the public - we even borrowed a robot from another team (because ours was never given back to us) to be able to do demos at community events and such, because we found it important to make sure we were known in the community and to hopefully make new contacts (who might be able to help us). We reached out to Kiwanis, Rotary and more local organizations, most of whom helped us make more contacts and made a small donation.
As far as getting organized - we worked on getting organized early and it definitely made a difference. Google, Microsoft, Canva, and Monday.com all have free plans and benefits for nonprofits. We used the Monday.com CRM to work on sponsorships and grant applications, Canva for all of our social media and marketing needs, and Google & Microsoft for things like hosting our email and website. We use Google Sites and set up Google Groups, a Google Calendar, and a Google Drive to organize all of our files, meetings, and to send out email blasts. Google Drive in particular is a lifesaver when you’re cranking out grant applications; it’s so much easier for multiple people to collaborate, edit and more. Microsoft provides a free Azure grant if you have a use case for it.
Also make sure you get registered for TechSoup as early as possible - once you’re approved once, it gets you discounts on software and hardware. This includes QuickBooks, which makes accounting and tax reporting much easier after the dust settles.
I also cannot highly enough recommend Zeffy as a fundraising platform - it’s very similar to GoFundMe, but has no processing fees like GoFundMe does. Every dollar counts in this situation. We include an explanation on our website letting possible donors know that if they choose to donate through Zeffy, 100% of their donation comes to us, and we also have a PayPal nonprofit account (discounted processing fees) that they can choose to utilize if they don’t wish to use Zeffy.
We struggled the most with finding a new workspace. We primarily focused on talking with sponsors and like minded community organizations about opportunities to work out of one of their spaces, and it eventually paid off in the form of trading out a financial sponsorship from our local state university for an in kind donation in the form of a workspace.
I would suggest starting a spreadsheet to manage a list of things that you need to purchase for your startup year. We maintained different tabs for different types/categories of items and prioritized items so we knew which order to buy stuff in. This takes a considerable amount of time, so definitely start working on it ASAP. Spectrum’s first $10,000 document might be a good place to get inspiration.
Good luck on this journey! It’s a long road ahead, but it’s worth it on the other side. We’ve raised more funds for the last three seasons than we ever had before, have added many students from a variety of different schools, took our FTC team to 2024 worlds for the first time in its 9 year history, took our FRC team to 2024 worlds based on points for the first time since our district incorporated, joined the Engineering Award Hexafecta Club, and won an event for the third time in our history. Though it feels like you’re standing at the base of a mountain right now, once the climb is over, the view is great!
Feel free to reach out if you have questions.
Editing to add: Start a database of alumni and other contacts now, if you don’t have one! We did not maintain one prior to the split, so we didn’t know how to contact our alumni to back us. Some found us organically as we moved through the process, but it would have been amazing to be able to reach them directly throughout.
Also - whenever possible, take the high road. We rarely discuss the details of our split, especially now that we’ve extracted everything we think is possible from our former school, and when people ask us about it, we usually just say that we split from the school district and leave it at that. The frustration is still there, but it has no benefit to us to share the details anymore. We were replaced by a rookie FRC team and this year we actually went back to our former host school to help them finish their robot (unwired and unprogrammed) for a week before their first comp.
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That’s great to hear about your progress.
If it all pans out, it would be good to hear about why this all happened in the first place.
As a person who has worked in a school system for now 30+ years, I cant figure out how your setup is with the school board/district as a fiduciary sponsor.
It sounds like you folks are setup similar to that of Team 973. I’m curious because I see a lot of the reasons why programs arent sustainable or fail due to forces outside their control. This really bothers me that a program like yours can be forced overnight to just shut down.
Thanks for sharing your progress.
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Wow, So much amazing information here. Thank you for the amount of time and detail you put into this, it definitely helps us move forward.
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We are a community team in FIM. We moved from a school district fiduciary to the ISD (RESA) to serve the entire county about 12 years ago in order to secure a large grant for mills, lathe, brake, saws, etc.
Over the course of time leading up to this event, the RESA came under the impression that we were "owned by them, and that our existence was at their discretion.
They made the decision to shut our doors by discussing with some superintendents at the subtending School districts that they would divide our assets and send the students and mentors to one of the 2 rookie teams that had started.
They failed to understand a few things about this plan…
- The team is the mentors and students, past and present, our achievements and history, our ethos of gracious professionalism and service. We are not our “stuff”, so we are not property that is owned.
- The stuff they were concerned about was the big machines, which we can replace. The teams they intended to send it to A) didn’t have space for it, B) didn’t have the skills or people to use it, and C) relied on our support to even field their robots.
- The stuff we cared about has no market value, was not purchased, and cannot be transferred to another team (our trophies, banners, peer awards, button and shirt collections, etc)
- The robot parts and old robots are “consumables”, as such, their expense was depreciated fully after they served their purpose.
- They didn’t understand that we aren’t a sports team where we had a head coach and a few parents that were hanging around to pass out juice boxes. We have a strong mentor base of industry professionals with over 250yr combined experience in software, mechanical, electrical engineering and data analysis, most without kids even on the team, here because we value the meaning of giving back to the future.
- They believed we could not exist without them.
They assumed after 18 years of volunteering that when they shut the doors, we would all just go back to our day jobs and kick our feet up to relax.
We asked them to come to the table to have a discussion about how to amicably separate, and they denied our meeting requests and locked us out.
They backed us into a corner where we had nothing to lose and everything to gain. We again asked them to come to have a discussion and at least explain what the overall goals of the end of our program were and they ignored our requests. We let the community that voted their millage know the situation we were in and what it meant to the area to lose our program.
From here on out, the media and community attention took on it’s own life and we are in for the ride.
We have been receiving positive impact statements from teams, alumni, parents and supporters from around the world on what the NC GEARS have done for them.
The district has been doubling down on public statements and negative actions for reasons unknown to us, and each time, we respond by publishing another story from someone whose life was changed by their involvement with Team 1918, or from a team that we helped.
Win or lose, we still win, because we can get new stuff, but reconnecting with our community and our alumni is more valuable than anything the district could ever take away from us. Sooner or later, they will pay the Piper for their own actions, and we need to do nothing at all for that to happen.
We recommend checking out our Facebook page, Redirecting... (“Fan Page of 1918 NC GEARS”) to see some incredibly powerful statements and to learn more about how we are handling ourselves.
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Fascinating. This fills in a number of gaps in a very peculiar story. So much of the trouble in the world is caused not by malice but by incompetence. There was clearly no understanding of what FIRST actually is. At an earlier phase of this a quiet conversation followed by the opportunity to save face would have been in order. For whatever reason - and we should all be grownups and acknowledge it could have elements from both sides - it did not happen.
Winning and Losing. For your renewed team I foresee some great opportunities to take a motivated, fired up group from rebuild to success. Go for it. But those two rookie teams that you mention…how will things go for them?
I’m on the periphery of discussions in adjacent communities regarding starting a team and in another instance helping one get over short term issues. I tell 'em its like a recipe for cake. You have a number of ingredients that are essentials before you can start customizing. Students, Mentors, Resources (money, materials, work and storage space). The most ephemeral one is Administrative Support.
I sense that with this current crew you may prevail, but that they will do you no favors.
Carry on. Try to make sure your rebound includes as many students as you can manage. Those members of rookie teams have done nothing wrong.
Maybe you guys need to run for school board.
T
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Since we are not going anywhere, we will continue to support them, as we have since their founding.
One of them, a first year rookie, we hosted at our kickoff, strategy, and design meetings. We supplied them parts they could not afford, taught them how to write code for and utilize equipment they were unfamiliar with. We hosted them at our build space and helped them refine their design and build new mechanisms. We taught them the ins and outs of how to navigate FIRST, events, grants, and finding mentors. With our guidance, they were able to win a Rookie inspiration award, a fact we are nearly as proud of as they are.
The other, a neighbor about 500yd away from our build space, we had at our lab multiple times. We helped them get their kitbot up and running. We helped them get functional code and worked with their students to teach them how to program the robot. We attended their events to make sure they passed inspection with a functioning robot and made it to their matches.
The loss of our program also would mean the loss of this level of support, which the district doesn’t understand.
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Not that simple. An RESA is a Regional Education Service Area. They are also known as Intermediate School Districts (ISD). They were formed in Michigan to oversee and consolidate local school district programs. They are usually at a county level, but counties with smaller populations may be combined into one ISD. Since school districts in Michigan don’t follow county boundaries, they don’t strictly follow county lines.
Each ISD/RESA is governed by a board that is elected/appointed by the individual local school districts that comprise the ISD.
Primary responsibilities for an ISD are auditing school attendance counts (because state funding is based on number of students), special education, and career and technical education. It’s probably that last one that is the reason NC GEARS is/was administered by the RESA.
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Ah. Additional clarification. Thanks. Doesn’t every additional level of bureaucracy become less in tune with reality? But this is also an opportunity. If they are charged with an area wide oversight of tech ed they might see the logic of not stamping out this level of expertise and support for those rookie programs. And input from the School Boards that they oversee should have impact.
T
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Jim,
Thank you for sharing. It’s much clearer now what your situation is.
It’s too bad these misunderstandings led to such decisions.
Wish you folks the best of luck. No doubt 1918 will be back up and running full speed in the near future.
-Glenn
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Thanks to all the support from the community, other teams, FIRST and our sponsors, we have made major headway in resolving our dispute with the district in a way that not only solves their commitments, but allows our program to continue as we have desired.
We anticipate issuing a joint press release with the school district soon.
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Keep fighting for those kids!!!
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Oh, another thing I forgot in my previous post - reach out to your local library and ask about their nonprofit resources! Our local library has memberships to national grant search databases that we can use, and we’ve also partnered with them before on outreach events.
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As much of a negative reputation attorneys get, many will also offer free counseling for anyone looking to set up 501c3’s, especially if you can find anyone associated with a team member/mentor/alum.
On another note:
Whatever next steps you take - make sure the schools involved don’t negatively impact kids who want to participate - they need to allow excused absences for students to be able to attend events that require missing school. Make sure this is explicitly stated in whatever agreement you come to.
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THIS!!! My Team(s) finally have an agreements where they can miss school if the event is more than 2.5 hours away since load in for FNC starts at 5 and our school system gets out at 2:30.
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We spent some time today discussing this specifically with the RESA, who we have basically made amends with. While we are now entirely independent of the RESA, they agreed that making students choose between the educational opportunities of a robotics competition and maintaining good or perfect attendance at school is unfair to the students.
Since our team has a tight attendance policy, most of our team members also wants to have perfect attendance at school, which we think is extremely admirable. It sounds like the schools are in agreement, and we are only talking about a 4, maybe 7 days per season (depending on if we go to CMP).
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