Rolling Thunder Meets with NY State Senator Funke

Today is a very important day for team 1511. Today, Friday, February 06, 2015, we met with Senator Funke. He took time out of his schedule to come and see us at our own school! We were expecting a meeting of about fifteen to twenty minutes, but he surprised us. He gave us forty minutes out of his day to talk to us about FIRST.

And that was pretty cool.

We started our tour at the loading dock, our unofficial door for the team, and went on to show him our past years robots, our design processes, the work-in-progress robot, and our two shops. He even drove our prototype drive train around!

When we were finished giving him a tour and talking about certain highlights of what our team does, we finished in the conference room to talk about the real issues. There is a $250,000 grant that our team is trying to put into the state budget. Senator Robach and Assemblyman Johns both signed onto the bill saying that they would support it. We asked Funke if he would support us too.

Without hesitation, he said yes!

What this means is that we now have three representatives from the NY state legislature on the same page with us about a bill that could provide grant money to schools who want a FIRST program, but cannot afford it. If this gets put into the state budget, it could be phenomenal for the spread of FIRST throughout New York State.

We plan on taking the skills we have learned last year at DC with FRC27 and the newer skills we have learned talking with our own representatives, and go back to DC in June to talk again to the National Government.

Who knows what we can do?

Well, we can do a lot. FIRST is not just a bunch of kids playing with robots. FIRST is a bunch of kids who go out into their communities and make differences. We are the generation that changes the government and the education standards. We’re the kids who build robots, and do it pretty damn well.

We’re the kids who wear the weird camo pants. We’re FIRST robotics kids. We’re team 1511. We’re Rolling Thunder.

And we’re proud of it.

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