This was sent out to teams competing at the Sacramento Regional today. Are any other events doing something similar?
I looked through the manual a few times and can’t find any references to this 10:1 ratio.
In order to keep our events as COVID safe as possible, we are not planning to allow any spectators to attend our California Regionals this year. We understand that teams may have some parents who are not registered mentors, but support the team in essential ways, such as transportation, chaperones, or food delivery. Therefore, we’re asking teams to submit a complete list of people associated with the team who plan to attend no later than one week before the event. We ask that teams keep in mind FIRST’s expected student to adult ratio of 10:1, and apply gracious professionalism in identifying who will be attending. Any teams submitting lists that vary too far from this ratio may be asked to reduce the number of adults attending. The event will be webcast on Twitch and we will have the link soon that you can share with friends, family and fans of your team that cannot attend. We do also have volunteer roles available for those that want to help with the event! They can sign up on the FIRST website.
Well, the Youth Protection Policy Program Guide, page 23 “Adult Supervision”, suggests that one should have 1 adult per 10 students for FRC team travel (with a minimum of 2 adults of course), but that ratio would be a minimum number of adults, not a maximum. I’m guessing that something similar may be what that event is basing their numbers on.
CVR also has this limit it seems. Monterey does not.
I’m not sure if I’m reading this right, but the way I’m interpreting this is that mentors are not included in this 10:1 ratio and that this only applies to non-mentor parents. If this does include mentors, this rule seems unfeasible to me.
10:1 ratio? We had more mentors than students at week 0 (still under 10 total people) and I was still terrified I was gonna lose a kid. Whoever decided I should be allowed to mentor is crazy!
Even if we brought every single student and mentor we had we’d probably be one of the smallest teams at most events we attended. If they tried to limit the # of mentors we could have because of our ratio I’d be pretty upset. I understand wanting to ensure as many students as possible can attend, but the absolute lowest capacity limit I’ve seen was 10 people, and even at that we could still comfortably take every single student and then a handful of mentors.
I really hope this isn’t enforced, the proper mentor to student ratio is a deeply personal thing that will vary for each team and what each mentor feels capable of, especially if mentors are trying to fill multiple roles such as drive coach and chaperone
It says adult to student ratio. I’d assume mentors count as adults no? I could be wrong. I mean, they let me mentor so like, maybe they don’t have to be adults… For legal reasons that’s a joke. I’m definitely an adult and not 20 pigeons in a trench coat and a cape.
Indiana was previously closed to spectators (all attendees needed to be registered with teams competing at the event) but they have rolled back on that now.
Sounds like they have good intentions but may be overstepping a bit. This seems like a step between hard quantity limits on number of attendees and an open door policy like we’ve had before.
