Pool to close FOREVER

Next week is the final week the school pool will be open. Ever. The pool is set to close at the end of March.

The filling in of the pool with a mixture of foam and concrete will begin shortly afterwards, as the space is converted into offices and a preschool room for the soon-to-be-renovated Tower-Soudan Elementary School.

In the end, the huge show of community support didn’t matter. Hundreds of people attended a series of community meetings and gave their unconditional support to preserving the pool. The pool was truly a community asset. The pool was clearly important to the entire community. People pleaded, discussed the pool’s history, but in the end, it seemed, the school board had already made up their minds.

The pool was going to go.

The board, with six members who had never been in the pool, decided it didn’t want to support a pool at the Tower-Soudan School, and it was going to close. They cited the costs of bringing the pool “up to code,” and stated that keeping the pool would mean less money for other renovations at the school. The district had spent close to a half a million dollars, just a few years ago, to upgrade the pool’s ventilation system. This isn’t the only pool the district is planning on closing. Cook will also lose their pool, which is much newer than the Tower pool, unless someone steps in to buy the old Cook School building, an unlikely prospect.

Sure, our pool was a bit old, rough along the edges, the locker rooms were in tough shape, and sometimes the showers only spewed cold water. But the kids didn’t care. Swimming was the best part of their day on a cold, dreary winter afternoon.

And for some kids, the pool is a place where everything equals out. For students with physical challenges, being in the pool is a time when they are truly equals with their classmates. Everybody floats. And lots of kids still need life jackets.

The pool is used fall, winter and spring by both young and old. Elementary students get a weekly swim time during gym. Seniors go to water aerobics several mornings each week. Other adults take part in early-morning lap swim. Fun swims afterschool are uniformly well-attended. A small group of dedicated swim instructors and lifeguards have taught many generations of our kids how to swim. Growing up on the shores of Lake Vermilion means that swimming is an important part of every child’s education.

After-school swim lessons have been a yearly ritual for most elementary-aged children. Moms would sit, peel off their winter layers and complain about the heat, relax and catch up on local news, then try to herd kids back out of the locker room when lesson time was over. We’ve been blessed with some amazing swim teachers, and they’ve been able to form lifelong ties to children in the community.

Some of the kids are too little to understand that the pool won’t be there next winter. The preschoolers at fun swim this week won’t be getting their swimming lessons in town. Maybe they won’t learn how to swim. But the elementary-aged students are old enough to understand. And for them, the loss of the pool is like the loss of a friend. It hurts. And this week the pool will not just be filled with chlorinated water, but also will be diluted with some salty tears.