The Valley View Barra-Cougars Swim Team may lose a place to swim if the district closes the team’s home pool. The Valley View School district is considering shutting down the pool at Valley View High School in Archbald, PA.
The Barra-Cougars are a community team and not connected to the high school, but the Barra-Cougars call the high school’s pool their home. They utilize the pool everyday and have no other pool in which they can use for practices.
The District is considering closing the pool due to budget concerns. The Barra-Cougars, however, are not going to go down without a fight.
“Our swimmers created a video to spread awareness of our team and our situation, they posted it to youtube and we are all shaing it on facebook, twitter and other social media in the hopes it will go viral.” said Jennifer Morgan. “The youtube link is below, it is an amazing example of children fighting for something they love and care about the most!”
“We need help, we need ideas, we may need to raise funds to help keep our home. We need to Save Our Pool so we can JUST KEEP SWIMMING!!!” added Morgan.
If you are interested in helping the Barra-Cougars, email [email protected] to find out how.
SwimSwam reached out to the District Athletic department for a comment, but has not received a response.
This is happening all over the country. Pools are expensive to operate. Schools are notorious for deferring maintenance. School pools should be leased to non-profits who then run them with the goal being to cover operating costs and putting enough away to take care of the maintenance.
This is happening currently to my old high school. East Pennsboror in Enola, PA. The high school practices in the pool located at the middle school and the school district is trying to shut it down because they say it cost too much money. They school district has already caused my club team to leave and now the high school kids may not have a pool to practice in either!
This is not good for the sport, I hope the swimmers can find a new team nearby.
My advice is to form a nonprofit and offer to buy/lease the pool for $1 but first do a facility reserve study and a feasibility study to see if the club and surrounding community is capable of supporting the cost of maintaining the pool. I see a lot of swimathons on your horizon
My son’s team has been turfed from three different pools- once due to the closure of the aquatics program at a YMCA, once because the pool rent became too exorbitant, and the last time due to pool renovations. This seems to be becoming more and more common, sadly. This team has my sincere sympathies.