ORLANDO, Fla. — Elise Rina has been fascinated with building things since she was a little girl, delighting in the make-a-robot-from-a-soda-can kit she got for Christmas one year and joining the Lego robotics club at her elementary school.
Rina’s mother, a high school art teacher, splurged to send her daughter to a week of robotics camp one summer, but beyond that their middle-class family wasn’t sure how to pay for or expand their daughter’s mechanical interests.
Then the family learned that the Walt Disney Boys & Girls Club in Pine Hills, Florida, had a robotics team, one supported by Disney Imagineering, the creative division behind the company’s attractions, and free to students who are club members.
“I was like: I need to come here, and I need to be part of this team,” said Rina, now a 19-year-old college student.
Her time with Rockstar Robotics let her build robots, compete on a robotics team and snag several awards. The Edgewater High School graduate is now a student at Spelman College in Atlanta, studying math and industrial engineering. She credits it all, including a Spelman scholarship, to the Boys & Girls Club.
This summer, the Trump administration announced it was freezing $6 billion in funding for after-school and summer programs, adult literacy and English lessons, among others, a move that alarmed public schools and nonprofits like Boys & Girls Clubs.
Nationwide, the organization said 900 clubs might close if the money was not restored soon, and the Central Florida club put out a public plea, saying its programs — which provide childcare for many low-income working parents — would be in jeopardy if its $2.4 million remained frozen.
The administration released the funding, but for families like Rina’s, the threat crystallized the impact the club has had on their lives.
“Without the mentorship I got here, without the materials I got from here, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t have even known I had it in me to do it,” Rina said.
The mission of the club’s team is to introduce students to computer science and engineering, showing them that “math and science are just as fun as being a rock star.” A $500,000 donation from Disney allowed the club to upgrade to a new robotics lab that opened in 2022.
In high school, Rockstar members compete in FIRST Robotics events, which draw students from across the country, and even the world. In the competitions, they build robots that can throw basketballs through hoops, hang from bars and collect pieces of plastic piping and thread them through rods. They race their robots — roughly the size of a lawnmower — against competitors.
The club’s younger members compete in the First Lego League, which involves similar challenges but on a smaller scale and with robots made of Legos.
Despite her excitement to join the club, when Rina first signed up, she was too nervous to walk into the robotics lab because she saw only boys and worried they’d tease her.
Her mother, Markita Rina, alerted club leaders to the issue and then Josh Harrison, a Disney employee and club mentor, made it a point to pull her into the room at the next meeting. Rina would go on to become club captain and work to recruit more girls.
The robotics competitions and the materials and tools needed to build robots are expensive, with team entry fees at $6,000, so Rina said she’s grateful the Boys & Girls Club covers those costs.
“A lot of people that are able to experience these things are people that have the money, have the funds,” Rina said.
Soon after Rina joined the club, Harrison and other mentors helped her with a middle school science fair project, which was prompted by the death of a baby in a hot car, a local tragedy Rina saw in the news.
Her idea was a car seat thermometer that, if it measured unsafe temperatures, would trigger the window to roll down and an alarm to sound. Rina built a prototype using a salvaged car door from a junkyard, working with Harrison and other mentors.
The project earned Rina an award as one of the top 30 middle school scientists in 2020 from the Society for Science, a Washington DC nonprofit.
“She definitely works hard. And it was a joy working with her. She has ideas, and she accomplishes them,” Harrison said.
When Rina is home on breaks, she volunteers full-time at the club and pushes for other Boys & Girls Clubs to add robotics teams to their offerings, convinced it would help more students focus on math and science.
The Eatonville club now has a robotics team similar to Rockstar, and Rina and her teammates helped get it off the ground, club officials said.
“For those of us in the middle class, we are not independently wealthy, and our kids, in my opinion, deserve to be exposed to different things,” Markita Rina said. “The Boys & Girls Club gave her the opportunity.”
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