In a couple of other threads, namely the practice bot one*, I’ve seen teams mentioning travelling (sometimes great distances) to scrimmage with other teams. My question is a matter of practicality, how does your team arrange transportation for the team (and robot/tools) for unofficial activities like this? Do you get bussing? Do mentors provide transportation for students? Do parents drive? Do students drive other students? How is liability covered (especially in the case of mentors or students driving)?
1712 has tended to avoided having mentors driving students both from a YPP and liability perspective. We get school bussing for competitions (including off-seasons) or activities during the school day (field trips), but that doesn’t really work for scrimmaging with other teams or lower key outreach event.
*The spiral of threads evolving from the six week build season one is pretty awesome
We take a bus to any official competition or offseason competition. We also take a bus to the Indiana FIRST Forums, since it’s a major team activity and not close. If events occur within in the school district, we just have students drive/parents drop off at the venues.
For other optional local or small activities, it’s a “find your own transportation” policy.
In terms of parents driving other students or students driving other students, we leave that determination up to the parents of the students. We don’t facilitate any ride-sharing.
Our mentors are prohibited from transporting students for any events or even transporting them to practice due to liability concerns. When a mentor is also a parent, it blurs the line.
Side Note: Because transportation is such a big pain with respect to school policies, we have made a big push to host things locally, including our own scrimmage event.
School rules prohibit mentors driving students, so that option is easily dismissed. For our regional in Duluth (and maybe champs if we make it), the team gets a bus. All our other events are local, right here in the twin cities, so it’s up to the students to arrange their own transportation - mostly parents running carpools, but some student carpools as well. After all, it’s really no different that our team meetings- there are student and parent driven carpools for those as well. I imagine any non-local offseason events we did would be bussed, just like Duluth or champs.
As a non-school team, the mentors or parents drive rented or personal vehicles. For regular season events, we rent two 15 passenger vans. One for people and the second with no seats for the robot, pit, and tools. For off season events we rent one van to transport people, and the robot rides with whoever can fit it in their vehicle. For scrimmages and demos such as sponsor presentations or the Barnes and Noble event recently, the robot and students ride with parents or mentors since the whole team usually doesn’t attend.
I think he might mean that mentors can’t transport students to practice.
Your mentors aren’t allowed to come to practice? Is that due to the particular venue practice takes place in? That seems like an odd policy.
To answer the OP:
For any activities that do not require a school field trip form, we have no restrictions on transportation.
For any activities that require a school field trip form, only district-approved drivers can transport students. Parents, mentors and teachers can fill out the necessary forms to become a district approved driver.
We go to 254’s facility for practice each year. They meet on a NASA base, so additional restrictions are in place (need at least 2 mentors, 6 or so people max, etc). Since we only go to 254’s shop for driver practice, we end up taking a small team (drive + pit crew).
Sean,
I can understand the liability from an insurance/accident perspective concerning rides. What specific YPP concerns keep you from having mentors transport students? We train our entire team on YPP, and operate under a “rule of three”, which tends to mitigate YPP concerns. The rule of three applies to transportation, as well as team meetings. (In case you aren’t familiar with the rule of three, it just means making sure at least three people are in a room (or vehicle), so that an adult isn’t left one-on-one with a student.)
Is there something we are missing concerning YPP as it relates to transportation? Or is it more of a proactive sort of decision?
The YPP concerns apply to a single mentor and single student sharing a ride. It’s less of a concern for semi-official team functions (such as travelling to another team’s facility) as it is for stuff like picking up lunch or a student being unable to get a ride home after a particular meeting.
We are a community 4H team.
We get our liability insurance through 4H. We do need to register with them ahead of time each location we meet in order to have coverage, so we include a practice site that team 195 graciously opens up to area teams as well as our build site.
Official event sites do not need to be preregistered.
Transportation is mainly by mentor and parents in personal cars.
I encourage looking into 4H - they are gaining an ever larger presence in FIRST and offer some solutions for some teams. Some teams are both school based and 4H.
We get to turn all of these events into a field trip, and get the paperwork done, teacher driving school vehicle or pay for a school bus, etc. So we don’t go to as many things as we’d like to.
This is what we have to do pretty much. It can be time consuming. We get to deal with the fact that many of our students live on campus too and are away from their parents. Technology to take pictures of parental-signed forms and email them has progressed significantly though and it helps us quite a bit.
I despise/detest/hate/am afraid of paperwork. Definitely my biggest fear/phobia/problem. At least they are other people’s children though…
We’re a 4-H team, and any adult volunteer that has passed the screening process is allowed to drive kids (subject to the rule of three). This usually comes into play at regionals, where we often caravan and some parents will take a few other kids along with their own.
For less-official events, we’ll usually say “arrive at X at 8:00” and leave it to the kids. This seems to work well too.
For robot transportation, it’s almost always a parent with a truck or trailer. I think we’ve rented a cargo van twice in our history when that fell through, which mentors drove.
We use a mixture of personal vehicles, school vehicles, public transit and for-hire cars for most things.
For a typical meeting, some students will arrive in their own vehicles or with their parents, some will take the bus, some will be in the school van and some will be transported in a for-hire airport bus. This usually holds true for events that are nearby.
When we travel to Portland (180 mi.), we substitute the for-hire van with Amtrak
This is definitely something that is going to be an issue for the team that I am starting up. Many of the students have no means of transport, and especially late in the evening, the bus or walking may not be safe for them. I am going to be working with the administration to figure out what we can do, liability-wise, but it will definitely be a concern.
As is typical with private schools, parents / mentors drive the carpools. Drivers have to meet certain insurance requirements, and student parents have to sign permission slips, but otherwise it’s SOP.
Our transportation is relatively simple as it’s always the same. Any adults we can get carpool the students to the event. Driver’s need to fill out a form with the school to be able to transport students but that’s about it. We’ll usually prioritize adults with lots of seating to cut down on the amount of people needed.
For events within an hour or so of Slidell, we carpool/caravan, or by pre-arrangement, let people show up on scene. We rented a bus for CMP which carried students from 3946 and Mandeville (2992); most of the mentors carpooled, including one group which pulled the trailer.
Our official events require student transportation by school bus or a district approved coach bus vendor. Coach buses get a special inspection before students can board. There’s a required ratio between school approved chaperones and students. Chaperones must be teachers, with rare exceptions when additional teachers cannot be recruited.
School advisors/teachers cannot drive students under any circumstances unless they are the parent of the child.
Off-season or outreach events on weekends or after school hours only can be organized as parent outings where parents provide the transportation, but students cannot be excused from school for any such outings. Teachers are not therefore officially in charge of anything. School advisors can transport robot and gear, on their own time and unofficially of course.
