Remember, children can’t learn to swim without pool
In Lake Oswego School District, the superintendent’s initial recommendations for the 2009-10 school year include “raising fees, reducing pool hours and closing for extended time frames” in an effort to reduce the pool operating deficit by 50 percent.
Apart from a safety issue, integrating swimming back into the curriculum is a selling point at a time when our district seeks to attract tuition paying students. Lake Oswego School District has a pool; West Linn, Riverdale, Jesuit, Oregon Episcopal, Catlin Gabel, Our Lady of the Lake, and Touchstone do not.
This is another case where I wonder who is advising these people on public relations. Crying poor because you have to reduce taxpayer funded pool hours is not going to garner you much sympathy in my book.
Parents can feel free to take their kids to the YMCA, public pool or a river or lake. In a lot of districts around the state parents seem to think that it's the schools job to feed their kids (even during summer and spring break) but in Lake Oswego they think the schools should teach their kids how to swim.
5 comments:
Public pools are so...
socialist.
Mr. Daniel, I grew up in LO, and learned to swim at the UNHEATED local park in the former Lake Grove. At the time, MANY parents refused to allow their precious tykes to touch the "polluted" lake water, even though some of the most expensive homes in the area were on the lake.
I watched as (1964 Olympic Champion) Don Sholander (sp?) dove from the park dock in one of the annual length of the lake swims (about 4 miles).
The only indoor chlorinated pools available at the time were the UNHEATED, small and disgusting Marylhurst pool, and the heated, expensive, small, disgusting and crowded Beaverton pool.
The same Red Cross that exists today taught me how to swim. The whiny, affluent parents claiming an "entitlement" to publicly funded swim lessons didn't. Shame on them!
Because my wife and I actually care about water safety, we paid for rudimentary swim lessons for our son at our local pool. My son, who is a Boy Scout, learned to swim and dive in (gasp) UNHEATED Puget Sound, as well as other Boy Scout owned lakes.
A numnber of the students from area private schools actually live in LO, and if their parents want the public to subsidize the "life saving" swimming lessons for their precious bundles, they can pee up a rope. My wife and I consider the education and training of our family to be OUR responsibility, not our neighbors', and we will gladly pay for the services necessary.
If you can swim, and choose not to teach your children, keep them AWAY from the water!! If you can swim, and care about your kids, TEACH them! To my former neighbors in LO, stop the whining!
As usaual, MR. Daniel, you are right-on!
Is there a fee for using the pools? If not why can't a small feee be imposed to close the deficit. Who said there's a free lunch?
http://static.crooksandliars.com/files/uploads/2009/05/teapartydouches_a28cd.jpg
Cute picture. Does the government own the phone and electrical companies now? I haven't been following the Obama take overs recently.
Celebrate your march to Fascism now, choke on it later.
Capitalism is the only form of economic reality that extols the virtues of a free man and his inalienable right to the fruit of his mind and labor. All the rest, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, derive there power and existence from the barrel of a gun, the use of physical force.
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