To the community of Elko Nevada and other Rural Areas:

Our community has many great advantages of enriching our student’s education and future in the county. We have vast ranches that teach the many trades of agriculture in the area. The mines teach kids about natural resources from the earth. Our college has many trades for students to pursue. While these are resources others don’t have in their backyards, we are also missing major education advances to teach our children in the community. Because of our location our district spends a lot of money on travel for extracurricular activities such as sports, high school clubs and more. In order to teach students, the standards expected for the 21^st century, we need to start giving children more opportunities at a younger age. Elko is far behind the times in technology, advancements, and preparing students for the jobs not even created yet. Funding to support the robotics clubs in Elko is the first step to reaching our 21^st century technology standards, along with reaching the kids in new innovative ways. Our community thrives on sports, yet sports teams can’t support the whole school population. Many students don’t have opportunity to find their “nitch” in school because it isn’t presented to them. As a teacher supporting the Robotics team this year, and with the support of administration, we ask that as a district we consider what we can do to get more of the teams in our county and reaching kids who have a bright future in computer science, technology, and engineering. In communication with Nevada FIRST LEGO League, if our community could support 12 teams, we would be able to host a qualifying event in the Elko Area. This would alleviate travel issues per district policy, funding would be less stressful, and we can support each other more throughout the season. The other important thing about getting more teams and having them local is once students are ready to leave the FIRST LEGO League, they would be more prepared to feed into the FIRST TECH Challenge phase and not have to start from scratch. The high school level teams are in the community already and we would be supporting them as well. To gain a better understanding of what our teams do we highly encourage you to participate in seeing our Second annual Elko FIRST LEGO League Scrimmage. August 2021 at Mountain View Elementary School.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Jones

This project is to continue building awareness for the need of technology support in our school, district, and county. With such a rural county we are at a disadvantage compared to other counties in our state of Nevada such as Washoe (Reno) and Clark (Las Vegas) who have resources for these teams and programs. Advocating for the Robotics program shows my work in ACE in multiple ways. The first is we are trying to reach a diverse population of students for the program. We are reaching for the kids who don’t necessarily have sports in their liking. ACE has shown that we need to support the whole student body and make advancements in our education offered at the school. Finding funding to keep the program alive is also another hurdle we are facing. We are constantly working on fundraising. Through ACE I was able to work on the budget for the upcoming year with my administration, and work to set aside money for the Robotics program at the school. ACE has also encouraged me to write many grants to find other avenues of funding. The robotics program has become such a great way to involve our community and teach them about the amazing things these kids are doing. Our community thrives on engineers of all kinds, and technology for ranching and the mines. By showing the community we are encouraging students young, we get support from local businesses and stakeholders. Starting the robotics team, hosting scrimmages, and traveling with the team hours away is a continuous process. Our season runs with the school year. This gives the board, other schools, principals, and community members multiple chances to see our robotics teams and their accomplishments as well as the importance of the need.