At a typical American high school, one finds a crowd of adoring parents in the stands of a football game. Classic symbols like foam fingers and pompoms come to mind. At U-High, that kind dedication and support from parents is found on the sidelines of a robotics competition.
Wearing Cache Money sweatshirts and cheering as robots navigate various challenges, the parents attending these events are just a few of the coalition who have rallied around U-High’s robotics team through its network of almost 50 parents signed up to assist the club.
Sofia Picciola, Cache Money’s outreach and marketing coordinator, regularly feels the impact of parent involvement.
“Robotics is a super-intensive club. I think that it takes a lot of extra support,” she said. “To have the parents involved and supporting us is amazing, and we couldn’t do what we do without that.”
Support has increased along with team size. When design coordinator Mihir Epel first joined Cache Money, it had about 15 members. Now it has almost 40. As the team has grown, parents have begun to take on more tasks in the last year or two.
“They spend a lot of time with us, talk to us about our needs, help us discuss transportation to our events, sometimes to our practice fields and stuff like that,” he said. “And also some of these parents are so active they actually come to our build sessions and help us build the robot.”
Sofia believes parent dedication is prompted by the commitment of students. During competition season, team members face up to 20 hours of work a week split across four practice sessions. One of those weekly sessions is an eight-hour meeting on Saturday.
“Parents notice that their student is spending a lot of time at robotics and that it’s what they really enjoy,” Sofia said, “and so that prompts the parent to want to engage more and support their kid.”
Coach Darren Fuller initially found it challenging to engage parents because of a general lack of familiarity with robotics. However, he believes the necessity of advisers supervising these afterschool and weekend sessions has created a culture of devoted students and faculty, prompting advisers to do the extra work to involve parents.
Like Sofia, Mr. Fuller credits the involvement of parents to the rigor of the activity. Because while they may be missing foam fingers, parents of Cache Money members are never lacking commitment.
As Mr. Fuller describes it, “We have parents giving a lot of time, a lot of talent and a lot of treasure.”
