The Highland Park High School robotics team lost nearly all of its supplies and equipment inside a trailer that was stolen Sunday morning, but a quick outpouring of support is helping to get the team back on its feet in time for an upcoming competition.
The trailer is believed to have been stolen Sunday morning. It was found hours later on a residential street in the Highland Park neighborhood, but most of its interior had been cleaned out, said Marta Shore, business mentor for the team.
“We’ve done a preliminary look and it appears that most of the contents are gone,” she said. “They did leave a cart that one of our mentors created for storing motors, electronics, parts, and nuts, bolts, and screws, and the nuts, bolts, and screws are the only things that are left. Even our batteries and our safety kit were taken.”
The team’s robot was not in the trailer when it was stolen.
Without the materials contained in the trailer, the team — which has spent up to 30 hours a week for the past six weeks building the robot from scratch — will not be able to participate in the regional competition in Duluth on March 5, Shore said.
“We’re in the final stages of building and testing the robot,” Shore said. “They check to make sure we have all this. We have to have most of it in the next two to three weeks and need to replace some things even sooner so they can keep building.”
When community members heard about the theft, they stepped up and donated money to replace the stolen items. Team members were floored that people donated $2,500 to a fundraising page in a “matter of hours,” according to Shore.
“We are a public high school in St. Paul, and we don’t have a ton of resources, and the students worked so hard that the community stepping up like this is overwhelming,” she said. “I don’t know how it was found but I hope that everyone — the Facebook groups, the neighborhood groups spreading the word — I’m really hoping that it was our whole community supporting us and speaking out that helped find it.”
Shore said the team will meet Monday and discuss what needs to be replaced.
“We will use what we need from the over $2,500 donated to our team and offer refunds to donors for the rest,” she said. “I’m hopeful that, by the end of this week, we will be able to return to our regular schedule of fine-tuning and driving our robot.”
The trailer was found parked on a residential street near Cretin-Derham Hall High School, she said. The team believes it was stolen about 5 a.m. There was no further information Sunday afternoon about the thieves or where the trailer was found.
Despite the setback, the students went to a practice competition Sunday in Eden Prairie, she said.
“They scrambled and took seats out of someone’s car to get the robot there,” Shore said. “That’s how into it these kids are.”