Can drives adding to robotics team opportunities

The robotics team has a large budget and one way to help meet that budget is sponsors, but sponsors can’t cover 100 percent of it, so every year the Swartdogs host a bottle and can drive to significantly help fund their student travel fees, significantly lowering the cost for students to be able to come to events and other things. 

It has been tradition to do about two can drives a year. Mentor Kayla McIntyre has done four can drives since she joined the team as a mentor. 

The current amount raised is pending, but in previous years the team has raised up to and occasionally over $2,000. COVID has affected the can drive recently according to mentor Jan Newendorp, “COVID has caused people to pile up cans and have nowhere to take them, so people usually have extra.” 

The collection itself only takes a night or two to prepare and set up, but the coordination with the redemption center takes months in advance to get set up. The current way the can drive works is the team sets up two “sorting tables” and people drive by while other team members unload bags packed with cans and bottles, and those bags are then dumped into the table and once they are sorted the bags are tied and thrown into a U-Haul and driven by a coach, and a couple of students usually tail along to go and to redemption center and unload the truck, then repeat the process. 

The next robotics can drive will be on  Saturday, April 23, 2022, at 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the high school.

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