bpd-anon:

the-grey-tribe:

not-a-lizard:

wobblegong:

ceescedasticity:

jumpingjacktrash:

thischick25:

rafi-dangelo:

“Do people who can’t swim actually exist?”

Me:  I can’t swim and most of my family can’t.

“What about school?  We had to swim at least a little in order to pass gym class.”

Me: ((thinking about my tiny school and my poor school district))  What kind of school did you go to where y'all had a pool?

“I thought it was pretty common for schools to have pools.”

—————–

How many of y'all had pools in your school?  I wanna know how common this is, because I didn’t even know this was a thing.  It’s amazing how large and varied this country is and how different our experiences were growing up.

Speaking as someone who moved around quite a bit throughout my school years:
When we lived in middle-class, mainly white suburbs, our schools had pools (and sometimes swim teams). When we lived in poorer areas or mainly black/minority suburbs we almost unanimously did not. Even if the school had a swim team, there was either like one school, or like a Community Center facility that everyone went to to practice.

afaik, in the twin cities area when i was growing up all schools had you pass a basic swimming cert, just to make sure you wouldn’t be helpless if you fell in water. if your school didn’t have a pool they’d send you to one that did. the year i went to minnetonka we had kids from hopkins bussing in after school to take their swimming unit.

that was in the 80′s though. the right wing’s been systematically chipping away at school funding all this time. i wouldn’t be surprised if schools have stopped doing that. :(

Inner ring suburb in the late ‘90s, mostly white, no pool in the high school – though there were two pools in the school district, one in a community center and one in an elementary+middle school.

Tons of pools between private neighborhood pools & public rec centers, where I did K-12 and onwards: I don’t think anyone ever at any time did a single thing to make sure people knew how to swim though. At most there were after-school sports & (later) short electives. I learned because my dad was very “HECK YEAH A SPORT WITHOUT HIGH RISK OF PERMANENT INJURY” (I salute him being ahead of the pack there) but it was utterly an on-our-own-time thing.

Interestingly, my mother’s high school put everyone through a swimming unit for phys.ed. with the intention of people learning to swim. I say interestingly because I would not describe the place where she grew up as… affluent, fancy, whatever. I would instead point out that she lit a fire under her own ass to achieve escape velocity from the region with frightening determination; the grandparental visits of my childhood basically agree this was a fine choice. (Alternatively: “Why would I bother going to the 30th class reunion? Everyone is dead or in jail.”)

At this point I am curious if it was a matter of public welfare/community. Maybe back in the day when people were riding high on building public works it was deemed a good idea to build swimming pools & make sure kids learned how to swim? And then priorities shifted/the money for it dried up so forget it, your parents can teach you on their own time/dime.

(Which sucks and I find appalling, but that’s clearly the way the trend points from where I sit.)

In Poland:

 - large village, no swimming pool anywhere, although all the kids went in the river in the summer so we knew how to swim anyway

 - decent-sized town, one swimming pool on the other side of town from the high school.  We walked to there for several swimming classes - in the winter, with everyone’s wet hair freezing in the cold air. Surprisingly everyone survived. XD

Swimming classes were just for one year until everybody could swim. We took a bus to the next bigger town with a municipal pool. Half of the pool was reserved for lessons/closed off to the general public, during school hours.

I went to around twelve schools from kindergarten through high school, none of them dirt poor and some of them even large private schools. Not a single one had a pool. Never even heard of a school having a pool. Also never had swimming lessons in school involving busses to somewhere that did have a pool but like that could have happened at any of the schools I went to in the years I wasn’t there.

went to a suburban district that ballooned with white flight, the HS built in the 50s didn’t have a pool but the one built in the 1970s and the one from the 2000s did

I think swimming was on the gym curriculum of the schools that had one but not mine

I learned at lessons at the YMCA, that was pretty common (or at the community pools on the other side of town) and then swam in the smaller pool in my townhouse condominium development

also my college required you to either pass a swimming test coming in or take classes to learn and I heard of similar things at many others