Utah 2013

[Nerdy One]

Because the state tournament will be held at a med school, I would guess that we get a cadaver for anatomy! Yay!!!

[Nerdy One]

the sad thing is that no one cares about utah science olympiad

[Luo]

the sad thing is that no one cares about utah science olympiad

I, for one, care about Utah Science Olympiad! Incidentally, I noticed that Utah intends to host a national tournament in the near future, which I find very intriguing (and admirable, on the part of the state organization).

[Nerdy One]

Well thank you. However, I fear that you may be the only one. We're a very sciency state, you know. Extremely intelligent. and you're right, at the state level everything's great. It's just that most individual junior highs and high schools here are pretty much ignoring science olympiad at the moment. They don't "have the funding" (which really means they just prefer to pay for football, which makes no sense to me, but. . . to each their own, I suppose) but hopefully that will change before i graduate. The colleges care about us!!! Our main rival actually has a year-long Sci-oly CLASS!!! they get to spend an hour a day during school working on their events. No fair! Our principal would never agree to that. Oh, how I wish. . . . . but no, we will never get that much love.

[Luo]

Well thank you. However, I fear that you may be the only one. We're a very sciency state, you know. Extremely intelligent. and you're right, at the state level everything's great. It's just that most individual junior highs and high schools here are pretty much ignoring science olympiad at the moment. They don't "have the funding" (which really means they just prefer to pay for football, which makes no sense to me, but. . . to each their own, I suppose) but hopefully that will change before i graduate. The colleges care about us!!! Our main rival actually has a year-long Sci-oly CLASS!!! they get to spend an hour a day during school working on their events. No fair! Our principal would never agree to that. Oh, how I wish. . . . . but no, we will never get that much love.

On the issue of funding, we ask each member of our team to contribute $100 towards expenses at the beginning of the year. With 90 members (and a few opting out due to financial difficulties), we can raise over $7000 that way. We are able to reimburse all expenses with this funding (balsa wood for building events, parts for Robot Arm, books for study events, etc.) and pay all our registration and transportation costs for local tournaments. You might consider following such a system. If $100 is too much for most people to handle, dial it back to $50 and you'll still raise a significant chunk of money.

[EastStroudsburg13]

If you don't have over 30 people, though, I'd say scale it back to like $20 or so people aren't scared away. I know if our team tried that, we would definitely lose people, and since we never really had more than 20, that would absolutely kill us.

[bearasauras]

Try doing fund raiser(s) instead of asking for money directly. In some states, asking/requiring money for students in order to participate in these activities are not illegal, so make sure what you're doing is okay.

[Nerdy One]

other people are posting besides me! i feel so loved!
that's an excellent idea, however, we already have a 65 dollar pay-to-play fee which, actually, i have no idea what we pay for with that. but we still have to get registered for tourneys and buy shirts and stuff and it never seems to be enough. we can't really ask for more, because we have several people on fee waivers already. a fundraiser would be good if we could get organized, but, to be honest, we have very few people on varsity who care. sadly, our junior varsity team has more enthusiasm than we do.
however, they're mostly sevies, so makes sense.

[iwonder]

My school hosts an invitational early on in the year for fund raising, it's a big task, but it's good practice and it raises enough money for us to compete for the year.

[Nerdy One]

huh. we're a junior high, so i don't know how well that would go, but that's a pretty good idea.