Jun292016

POSTED AT 02:18 PM

Refocusing the Conversations


Thank you all for bringing your time and excellent ideas to bear on difficult issues. There is no more valuable thing than time, and we here who struggle with the beast value your time and ideas.


Givens:


1) The translation to some form of district model to California would be a benefit, as shown by Michael C. et. al. * I believe most on the Left Coast would agree to believe the hard part is making the disjointed pieces fall into place, thus the arguments bordering on acrimony, which I personally despise, which serve us in no way. Thanks to all who have contributed constructively to the conversation.


* https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CZUGfLFV3NI8q8_t1uo8w-OKw3J4ZHLj1O96uuh4V0w/edit


2) The roll out of the District Model must be a success the first time out, the first year it gets implemented. Otherwise the whole thing melts into a cold pile of slag, deepening the malaise of school site admin who were never believers in the first place, and others at the school site (teachers) who tire of money problems and drama when the regular school day overflows with it. 1


3) In urban/suburban areas so large and contiguous, an acknowledgement that FRC programs are one of many excellent options for students, parents, school administrators, donors to support. This cascades into making it difficult to ask service-minded people to put in more time on another service, or introduce new people to the program when there are so many outstanding programs and projects on which to spend their limited time. *


* Some of dozens: skillsusa (skillsusa.org/competitions), VEX (robotevents.com/map), FTC, F1inSchools (f1inschools.com)


4) Placing a large emphasis on supporting those I call (for lack of better imagery, and in no way disrespectful!) the Janitor Closet, the Cafeteria Table teams. Many of us in FRC started there and know the multidisciplinary difficulties to overcome, wanting to reduce them for struggling teams.


5) Geography, placement of teams, placement of venues, travel of teams to venues is difficult to clearly and concisely express by those on the inside of the SoCal dynamic to those on the outside unless those on the outside have had lengthy, working experience on the inside. This is not a statement of exclusionary bias, but one of acknowledging the difficulties to be overcome are more complex than can be apprehended from a cursory inspection. It goes without having to say that those of us on the inside of this thing are highly devoted to the best possible outcome for our students, which appears to be the District model.


6) The strategic view: It's not about robots. It's about education. It's about education in the technical and vocational, in the leadership learned by organizing complex endeavors, leading to personal, individual success and replenishing the larger skill base of the USA. 1 The game on the playing field is an extension of a form of education almost entirely lost in urban/suburban schools, thus the popularity and support for FRC by the public, and the bundles of cash pressed upon us and our students by businesses large and small. 2 The result: more teams and the need to better serve them by making more opportunity to run the robots at the games.


Local Barriers to Overcome:


Location:

What appears from satellite view a measurement of forty-five miles up or down a major thoroughfare can in reality be a two-hour commute both ways, with no place to park our trash when we get there. This is street-level reality. The narrow view from something like MapQuest to give travel routes/times is a superficial method to adequately measure the actual conditions on the roads, in the communities where teams actually reside, influencing where we propose to place events. To address the actualities requires careful selection of venue and unhesitating support by school site/school district admin.


* The simplicity of the statement becomes difficult to implement due to the reality of school site interest and support by the admin chain of command: On average, school site admin moves or gets moved every three years, with approximately twenty-five percent giving up on the profession. "This "churn" is particularly acute in high-poverty districts. Students in high-poverty (schools) are unlikely to have the same principal throughout their enrollment at a school, according to Cone's report." 3 This in turn means an education or reeducation of school site staff who like it that the geeky robot kids are off the streets, but don't grasp the strategic view of skill-building with wrenches, drill presses, and tools that appear to have been salvaged from the era of steam locomotion. This lack of foresight translates into lame support for our needs in site access and facilities.

* The newbie site admin may or may not be supportive, or actively hostile. "Hostile" in my view could mean lease fees inordinate to a community-based volunteer-served event, inordinate priority granted to other groups that seem to better serve school prestige (in our view there is no better way to up a school's prestige than having a FRC team, but that's not common admin thinking. On their side, they must juggle impossible tasks and competing interests, thus the turnover in admin who get burnt out or tossed out).

* Many suburban schools host non-school events at their site for the purposes of adding to the downtown office fiscal totals. One of our local schools, on weekends, hosts AYSO, community organization events, a foreign language school with hundreds of kids, teachers, and parents, besides school-based sports team events. The fees collected by the school district, throughout the district school system, are significant. Paying our way with market-rate lease fees is a doable thing, but puts out another community organization with long-standing roots, with the resulting animosity towards our programs.

* Urbana/Suburbia collect centers of technological innovation, driven by people with a great deal of education who put time into their kids, grooming them for future success. For their children they want the same achievement, if not identical education, despising the local schools, turning to extracurricular occupations for their kids. This in turn promotes kinds of extracurricular opportunities lacking in other parts of the country that are not attractors of this kind of education. 3A The result is competition for volunteers, competition for venues, competition for cash that could fund our own agenda. Attempting to reduce the "admission price" for entry into FRC by means of the District Model is a meritorious effort, but cannot mitigate the other forces competing in the dense urban/suburban areas for volunteers and venues. The dynamic must be recognized for what it is, and accounted for in our machinations. 3B

* The result of the above becomes overbooked facilities, parking difficulties, etc. The shuttle idea is meritorious, though bringing on a list of barriers to overcome that must be counted in cash and volunteer hours:

--Volunteer effort to creatively solve this problem, locating the off-site venue and dealing with insurance issues.

--Cost of shuttles, signage.

--Volunteers to staff the off-site venue and provide directivity and clean-up.

--Pre load-in directivity and instructions to teams and participants, bringing in thousands of pounds of gear.

--Web footprint to communicate, maps, etc.

None of these are deal-breakers; just allocation of already stretched resources. 4


* The overbooked time of volunteers; this is a cultural, behavioral affair, not an engineering problem with an engineered solution. Changeover and movement of people in the urban/suburban setting creates lack of stability despite our massive efforts to have key roles "shadowed" and having to beat the bushes for a larger pool of motivated volunteers. As a micro culture within FRC, event hosts want the best of officials, refs, judges FTA's, VC's, safety glasses hander-outers, etc.


* The venues themselves: Where weather is not so severe, facilities reflect it. In areas where schools support several large spaces like field houses and ancillary indoor areas to protect athletic classes and events from the weather, we here have architects who assume that athletic activities can be played outdoors school-year-wide with little difficulty. Ergo a single gym, smaller venues, fewer large meeting spaces we could use for pits, etc. This is not a deal-breaker, merely a check-mark beside venues in the various Circles we draw on GoogleEarth.


Back to location:

The views from Orcutt or Tehachapi or Madera are distinctively different than those from Redondo Beach or La Canada or Manual Arts High School. 5 The hurdles to overcome cannot be solved via the engineered approach. What seem to be engineering problems requiring engineered solutions are really behavioral problems requiring relationship solutions, many of which are outside our control; thus the solution continues to be the big three-four day regional spectacle, enduring the cost and limited access and limited play times, etc.

I do not wish here to step on more toes, but the difficulties cannot be solved via the engineering approach of counting the number of high schools/community colleges in the communities or region. The drawing of circles, collating with teams is a useful method to identify sites, then the solutions will have to be multidisciplinarian and relational, based on making relationships with administrators both at the site and the school district, teaching/convincing them of the efficacy of our programs. But these are things we are queens and kings of, despite their multivariable nature.


Proposals:


* Inclusivity: Those with the capacity to host, promote, and run FRC events need to talk to one another. We cannot raid each other's events for the sake of status or perceived primacy of programs or school/school district rivalry. It kills trust. The rumor mill runs wild with expectation, fear, and resignation, and the Players must be open and above board in their planning and fund-raising processes. I appreciate grooming donors. I've done some, don't like it personally, but appreciate that some of the background negotiation must be off the record. The events and placement of events must be in the FRC public sphere where good minds and altruistic motives can have their say.

* Start small, prove it, expand based on success. This is not like going to space or the moon where we killed people meanwhile. We built our capacity for spaceflight incrementally, with success propelling the next steps, and then the objective, a combined engineering/human relationship challenge. Maybe Northern Cal would be willing to be an incubator for the District model, proving it, gaining experience meanwhile to overcome our SoCal structural difficulties.

* It's incumbent on us to go to places where the District model is successful, poll, observe, interview, collect the data, shadow principal players to better grasp the macro/micro views and how to place ourselves within the mechanism. And how financing is acquired and parceled out.

* A simple, workable way must be found for teams outside the west coast Continental US to have choice of venue despite whatever District rules that others must adhere to. It's difficult enough to travel the distance to get here, deal with the language and cultural barriers, and exceptional accommodation must be provided.


Thank you all for your time, your excellent ideas, and willingness to collaborate in a venture so valuable for students.


Joe Petito

FRC 1197


1 http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-real-jobs-tragedy-in-the-us-we-ve-lost-the-skills

http://www.cornellhrreview.org/a-multilateral-approach-to-bridging-the-global-skills-gap/

http://mikerowe.com/2016/02/stopignoringskillsgap/

2 https://usfirst.submittable.com/submit/62717/2017-first-robotics-competition-rookie-grant-application

http://www.raytheon.com/news/feature/first-robotics-2016-champs.html

https://www.uschamberfoundation.org/boeing-bridges-stem-gap-first-partnership

http://www.firstinspires.org/scholarships

3 http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/11/the_high_rate_of_principal.html Accessed 6/29/16

http://www.ewa.org/blog-educated-reporter/impact-principal-turnover

3A A no-fault-item. This is not some holier-than-thou prescription--it's not meant to describe portions of the nation as better or worse educationally/socially; whatever. It's the hard reality of teaching and learning in schools, sited in their locales.

3B This weekend (11/5/16) I was herding my FLL kids and parents around an event sited at a Chartered school in Westchester, CA. A FRC team rolled in to do a presentation, and my single-minded thinking assumed they were there to promote FRC to the FLL crowd. Unbeknownst to me was another group in the library that the FRC team was slated to do their presentation to. Finally figuring it out and getting the FRC kids and their gear to the library, I chatted with the organizers of the library event, finding they too were volunteers intent on pushing/pulling inner-city kids into successful professional careers. Commendable by several multiplication factors. This anecdote though exposes the "rivalry" (a bad word, not meant in a competitive sense…) for sites and volunteers and participants. Out on the playing field meanwhile were soccer games and clinics with maybe two hundred kids and parents, operated by a Professional British Football Bloke, renting the facility through official channels, and paying the fees. There was no parking anywhere, and the upscale neighborhood was jammed with vehicles. The local shopping center has warned the school repeatedly not to permit event parking in their lot.

4 Those who are quick to propose parking be held off-site are incognizant of an urban/suburban truism: There is no off-site parking without paying for it * (and getting a million's worth of insurance to cover liability). In areas of the country where open space between towns and cities means finding a vacant lot somewhere, there are no vacant lots to be had. The BigBox Marts with their seemingly vast parking areas will not accede to having customer convenience quashed by our traffic in rental trailers and vans and busses and pop-up tailgate lunches.

5  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/us/los-angeles-drivers-on-the-405-ask-was-1-6-billion-worth-it.html

* Which of us will park a quarter mile from the venue, haul our gear, chaperone our students through the neighborhood and pay confiscatory fees for the privilege? http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-rams-parking-20160918-snap-story.html

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