Handicapped or not

[Jon Stratis]

Just throwing my two cents in here... While there may not be official rules limiting age like there used to be, FRC is designed for high school aged children. In fact, FIRST's website defines FLL as K-3, FTC as 4-8, and FRC as 9-12. If it comes down to a question of students younger than high school aged, I would say FIRST does not have to make any accommodations for them - teams can use older students to drive, and those younger students can drive in a few years.

Now, for your case specifically... 14 years old certainly could be a freshman - but being 4 feet tall at that age, while short, is not necessarily a disability or medical condition. The way kids grow, he could be 5 feet tall by the start of school next year.

You also need to realize that the wall was designed with safety in mind. The aluminum portion extends 3 feet high (well, 35 inches according to the drawings). This means that a majority of the high speed impacts it takes (and it takes quite a few every year) occurs on this aluminum section. If they happened on the polycarbonate section, you can bet it would be broken and smashed before a single regional was over. By changing the wall design to provide a lower field of view, you would fundamentally be changing the safety characteristics of the field.

Now, lets talk about shelf height. The shelf sits about 3 feet off the ground, which makes it a comfortable surface for a vast majority of the drivers in first. Lowering it to accommodate someone like your driver would be detrimental to everyone else.

Finally, the idea of permitting a stool to stand on. Doing so provides several hazards, as others have point out - your student could fall off it, other students may trip over it, etc. Plus, it opens the door to unfair (and unsafe) advantages - if stools are allowed, why wouldn't a team try to get their driver up 7 feet high so they can see the field that much better?

And on a personal rant... We all want every kid to be successful in everything they do. But the truth of the matter is they aren't. Sometimes things don't work out, sometimes (like this example) the situation is simply set up against them. All too much these days our society sets up scenarios where kids will be successful or win regardless of what they actually do. We want them to be successful, so we lower the bar until everyone can be successful. Sure, it makes everyone feel good, but is it really helping the kids prepare for adulthood? If a kid is legitimately too short to be able to drive a robot, could this not help serve as a life lesson on managing expectations and understanding how to be successful (say, as part of the pit crew) despite these challenges?