[Lledargo]

My mistake, I suppose I should judge the mission off of the mission statement, and not what I remember Dean saying at the kickoffs I have attended.

However a part of the mission statement is "foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership." Firstly the word 'including' implies that those three skill are not all FIRST wants to encourage, but rather any skill that will give a FIRST student a heads up in the real world. Secondly, students who come from a diverse team(however rare) will tend to have better communication skills,because good communication skills are needed to work in any group, and better communication tend to be needed to work in a group of people who simply don't think alike.

That being said I still do feel that Exclusive teams are counterproductive to the FIRST mission. However as I said before discouraging the existence of such teams would take away the chance for students to learn all of other valuable skills they would learn on their team. So I feel it would be more counterproductive to FIRST to discourage the existence of exclusive teams.