Parents' meeting synopsis

Posted by Rebecca LohKamp on 15 January 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: 2010, competition, funding

The following is a message from PR Mentor Rebecca LohKamp summarizing the Parents' Meeting of Thursday the 14th.

We opened with introductions of the Team mentors and then the parents who also told us whom their child was, what grade they were in, what school they went to, and what experience - if any- they had in robotics.  We then watched a video (address to follow) that explains what FRC and FIRST is. It's about a 6 minute video but explains a lot and worth watching ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig0xwD4MyT0&NR=1 ). The only correction I have to make about it is that there isn't $8 million in scholarships, this year there are $12 million for participants on FIRST teams.

After a question and answer session we moved on to our most pressing need: Food.
Our most pressing issue at this point is the food issue. Most high school students eat little or nothing for breakfast and even less at lunch. By the time they get to robotics they're starving and when we are asking them to stay late, think and work with power tools we need to feed them. Every night we provide dinner for the team. I can't be the only one providing meals for 15 teenagers and 6 adults. We need each of you to volunteer to provide food for one night each week, Monday through Sunday. You don't have to cook it. You can buy pizza if you want and bring juice or soda. I have provided the meals every night so far, last night we had tomato soup and garlic bread, tonight we had noodle casserole. Last year Jesse's folks brought taco salad, somebody brought lasagna, its wide open. I then sent a calendar around for people to sign up on. The Crawfords (Jesse's parents) have signed up for Thursday nights. The Hastings signed up for Wednesday, Sheri Bandes (Jacob's mom) is providing dinner on the 16th of February, and Tony G is bringing Pizza on the 12th of February. Danyelle Web is cooking this Saturday at the Knights of Pythias so there are still lots of open days looking for someone to volunteer.

We then took a general look at the calendar. There has been a big focus on Kick Off and Build season, but, while that is a really important part of the program this is a year round program and there is a lot more than just building the robot to do.. For those of you who don't know this is a very expensive program to be part of. An absolutely minimal, basic program costs between $6,000 and $10,000. Our next fundraiser is February 13th and is a Valentines Dinner. We are charging $10 per plate and are offering a chicken entree or a manicotti entree. Tickets can be bought on the web site. How many of you have been to the team website? If we can sell 200 or more plates we have been promised a matching grant for the money we raise at this event.
    Jesse, team captain and senior at Cleveland High School, did a presentation on the team website which can be found at http://www.team1432.org/ The Valentines dinner tickets can be ordered on the peach colored line directly below the Swooshed Beaver.

At the bottom of the page you will find a link to Member Resources. By clicking on the Member Resources you will be brought to a page that has helpful links to US FIRST, Oregon FIRST, the Yahoo group - for sending e-mails to everyone at once, and mandatory paperwork for the team. Under the links is the calendar. Probably one of the most important pages for parents and team members to know how to access. Please take a look at it as soon as possible. You will note a number of dates on the calendar that do not have a name on them. This means that no parent has signed up to bring food yet. Please send Rebecca an e-mail with the dates you will be bringing food.

After showing us all the bells and whistles we discussed the more complete calendar.
February 22 the robot has to be complete because it ships on the 23rd which is also the date the Welcome baskets have to be done. If you hadn't heard our team really scored a coo by being asked by the Regional Director, out of all the teams in Oregon, to coordinate the making of "Welcome Baskets" for the out of state teams coming to the Oregon Regional this year. If you know anyone we could write to to request a product donation, or if you would like to ask them yourself, we are making 35 baskets. We are in fact making miniature apple boxes to use for the baskets. There were lots of questions as to what it was - the kind of product we're looking for. The truth is anything. There are lots of candy companies right here in Portland, Van Dynnes,  Godiva, Michelle's. There is also Reeser's Fine Foods, Beaver mustards, several chip companies, then there are the apple growers, pear growers, filbert growers, Tillamook Cheese, Blue Heron Cheese, Rogue River Cheese, Tillamook County Smoker, and it doesn't have to be food, how about hand sanitizer, wet ones, pocket kleenex. We will take anything and we will cheerfully put a catalogue or flier from the company in the box with their donation and we will list them on our website and put up a link to their company's website.

Competition is of course March 4-5-6. We need to be sure that every student has their school work done and their grades up so that they can go to the competition. There are in fact 3 different permission slips that have to be signed for attending the competition. This Segment was presented by Fritz Staats. FIRST has a release form that has to be filled out and signed everytime someone attends a FIRST sponsored activity. You signed one for kick off and you will need to sign one for the competition as well. In addition to that the school requires a school permission slip. The permission slip from the school not only needs to be signed by you but by everyone of your student's teachers, and they are only going to sign if your student is current on their homework and have adequate grades to allow them to miss school. So please remind your student that if they want to go to competition with the team they have to have their school work done! The third permission slip is for the team. In order for your student to travel in a car with anyone other than a parent there has to be a signed permission slip provided by the team that specifically states where we are going and that you are aware that your child will be riding in someone else's car and has your permission to do so. Anyone can of course come to the competition with their own parent or on Saturday but it would be a shame to miss out on the whole team experience. We would like to send you all e-mails to remind you of what's going on but for many of you we don't have addresses.

There will be of course another fund raiser in March - date to be announced after we know if we are going to the World Championship. In April we will be hosting a dinner for the members of the Reedwood Friends Church. They have been very supportive of the team throughout the years and never charged us for the use of their building for our fundraisers and they have even let us practice driving the robot on their carpet. Might I also say they didn't charge us when we left a divot in the wall from the robot crashing into it. 75% of their membership is currently unemployed and fixing them dinner is the least we can do. The date of the dinner is of course dependent on whether or not we go to the Championship. The Championship is April 15-16-17 in Atlanta, Georgia. Is it possible that we'll go? It is more likely this year than it ever has been before. It is so possible Mr. Swafford is scared because he'll have all of the paperwork to do. The cost of going back to Nationals is $30,000. If we win our way to the Championship we wil have to do some really heavy fund raising after the regionals.

April also begins the recruitment season for next year's team. Recruitment involves middle school visitations. Again we need students who can speak plainly, well, and have their school work done  and grades up so they can miss school to do this. April 29th is the team awards dinner - details to be announced after we know whether or not we go to the Championship.

May is the Multnomah County Fair. They are planning on making us a big draw item. We have to have multiple robots in drivable condition as well as presentation materials, speakers, videos, hand outs, and pins to just name a few things, which means on top of everything else we are doing after competition we have to get things ready for the fair. We will also need to schedule your students to man the booth at the fair. These robots are worth $10,000 apiece and we can't afford for one of them to go missing- not to mention we signed an agreement that we wouldn't sell any of the hardware they gave us and if someone steals one they won't be doing it to keep it intact. We also have a PTA visitation in May to show off the robot and tell them about our program.

June begins the process all over again with our yearly planning session, team elections, and goal setting.

That's a year in the life of a FRC team in a nut shell.

At this point Gabe asked if we could show the parents this year's game so we watched the video of the animation of this year's game. You will find it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iheq7yar5c4

We discussed the game for a while and then we closed with the fact that we were the little team that shouldn't be because we are up against teams sponsored by people like Daimler, Chrysler of Canada, Dupont, we sponsor ourselves. To close we watched the wining Chairman's Award video and then we looked at in what ways we were similar to the winning team. (Video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8MT7pSRXtg)
They are a team composed of students from many different schools, many of their students are from distressed backgrounds, they make their own robot, they have awesome mentors and so do we, the mentors are very proud of what the students accomplish, they help others and so do we, they are spreading the word about FIRST - we go to the Union Labor Day picnic each year with one of our robots to show it off and spread the word about FIRST, they share their experiences - we mentored two rookie teams last year,  they have robotics classes during the off season we do too but want to do more, they have mentors that are alumni - we have 5 alumni mentors currently, they have an enthusiastic team and so do we.

Our differences: They are sponsored by Dupont, they have a lot of out of robotics activities for fun, they give out personal recognition awards at competition - we have never done that before but even before we saw this video we had decided to do just that this year, they have several yearly service projects, they have an award winning website, they have a huge amount of parental support.

This is where we are and this is where we're going. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8MT7pSRXtg&NR=1

If you want to see another winning video, you can look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwmqShpkmgA&NR=1