Assemblyman Ciattarelli to address school board Monday
By Gene Robbins, Managing Editor
Leaders of Hillsborough High School’s robotics team plan to ask the Board of Education on Monday to include money in the upcoming year’s school budget for the science-based activity.
They will have a powerful proponent help make the case. State Assemblyman Jack M. Ciattarelli, who lives in the township, said he expects to speak at the meeting before handing off the microphone to parents and students.
He said he wanted the school to establish the RoboRaiders as an activity just like sports team, theater or school band.
He said the team, known as the RoboRaiders or Team 75, depends “almost entirely” on private donations, although the school district does pay for advisors at the high and middle schools.
The organization organizes such events as golf tournaments and spaghetti dinners to offset costs to buy equipment to travel to competitions, which have community service and public relations prizes as well as engineering related.
The club has 118 students, he said, and has brought honor to itself and the district by its success in competitions and community outreach. All Team 75 members since 2008 have attended college, he said.
This past weekend, Team 75 won the field competition among 38 teams at the Mount Olive district event and also won the Engineering Inspiration award.
Mr. Ciattarelli asked the board to consider putting $20,000 in the school budget. If that couldn’t be done in 2014-15, he suggested establishing it as a bona-fide extra-curricular activity and budgeting $10,000 this year, $15,000 in the next, and $20,000 in the third year.
Team 75 receives a donation from Johnson & Johnson, especially in the form of mentors who lead students in building the robot from a kit supplied by a national organization. For that, he was “forever grateful,” he said Tuesday. But he wondered how long private corporations would support such activities, and whether it was sustainable over the long run.
He said Bristol-Myers Squibb, for instance, has recently stopped its financial support of Montgomery High School Robotics, and copied the board members on a newspaper article that said Middlesex High’s team had recently lost a major corporate sponsor.
In letters to the school board this week, Mr. Ciattarelli wrote, “Funding Hillsborough Robotics as a bona-fide extracurricular high school activity — as Bridgewater-Raritan, Hunterdon Central and Montgomery school districts do — is sound public policy and a perfectly appropriate, if not necessary, use of taxpayer dollars.” Those schools provide $10,000 to $18,000 per year, he said.
He said it is “also symbolically important in our community.”
In addition to robotics competitions, the RoboRaiders have participated in such community outreach as buying and leading kids in assembling bicycles, organizing a science program for young women, teaching younger students about robotics and packing and shipping care package to military troops abroad.

