Most high school students are worried about their GPAs, how they’ll score in their next test or who they’ll go to prom with. But one class at Lindbergh High School seemed to be more worried about how to help someone achieve their dream in the international arena.

Creed Nelson’s Construction, Manufacturing and Aerospace class recently helped build a stabilizing platform for 2016 Olympics hopeful Steve Ferreira.

Ferreira is bound to a wheelchair due to cerebral palsy. But his disabilities have not stopped him from reaching his dreams as an award-winning shot put and hammer throw athlete who is hoping to earn a spot in this year’s American Paralympics team.

Nelson met Ferreira through a mutual friend and soon found that he was looking to improve his platform, which he used to throw the shot put from.

“I thought that it was something we could do,” said Nelson. “That’s something we can get our classes involved in. So I brought the platform here, then Steve came and talked to one of our classes.”

According to Nelson, many of his students were deeply impacted by meeting Ferreira.

“[Steve’s] extremely physically disabled, but he’s a funny guy and a personable guy,” he said. “He came and was able to talk to the class, and within five minutes, the whole class was really comfortable. They were laughing at his jokes and everybody wanted to see how they could get involved and help him out.”

Within weeks, the class came up with the platform’s design and completed the prototypes. The challenge came to welding parts for platform as it was made out of aluminum. The school’s workshop is equipped to weld steel but not aluminum.

Nelson solicited the help of American Welding Society and a Seattle-based welding fabrication shop, Machinist Inc., and invited three of his promising students to come along and help weld the parts for the platform.

Among those students were seniors Riley Owens and Karl Mazur, both of whom said that the process of seeing and learning how to weld aluminum was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“I’m part of the robotics team and usually we work on robots,” said Mazur. “It’s similar in the mindset of putting it together and the mindset of solving a problem. But it’s different because we don’t work with aluminum that much with robots. So it was cool figuring out how to solve this problem, especially when we went to the aluminum-welding place.”

After the welding, repainting, and putting together the platform, Nelson and his class were finally able to show the final product to Ferreira.

“The way I saw his face light up when he saw the chair was incredible,” said Mazur. “He automatically tried to jump out of his chair to try it out and he loved it. That smile… I can’t show you or explain how happy he was. And that made me happy to know that I helped someone like him to do something like that. To be honest, I like building robots but helping a human being get to Rio and helping him achieve his dream is kind of better in my opinion. The season just ended for robotics, but for him, his career just started.”

“Making a difference in someone’s life like that, particularly for younger people, they don’t have a lot of opportunities to do something like that,” said Nelson. “In real life, it’s hard to have those kinds of opportunities.”

According to Nelson, Ferreira has shown significant improvement since he received his new platform, a 20 percent increase in his shot put throwing distance.

Currently, Ferreira is scheduled to compete in qualifying regional competitions this month, national qualifiers in June, and hopefully, the Paralympics later this year.