SINK OR SWIM?
City set to pull plug on funding for three TDSB pools,
The future of three school pools is under threat after the city notified the Toronto public board that it is no longer interested in running programs at Brown, Bendale and Wilfrid Laurier.
Trustee Shelley Laskin put forward a motion, which passed, at Tuesday’s budget committee after the board found out about the move, arguing the city hasn’t given enough notice, as required.
The city and board have an agreement that runs through to 2017 for the city to fund 33 pools, with the city covering all operating costs. The pools are used by schools during the day and open to the wider community after hours and throughout the summer.
Laskin’s motion says “notice must occur on January 1st for any change in the number of pools to commence September 1st . . .(and) no notice was given . . . to the affected communities” either through city budget consultations or through the board-city committee.
She is asking that board Director John Malloy “formally request the City continue the operations of the pools at Brown Junior Public School, Sir Wilfrid Laurier Collegiate Institute and Bendale Business and Technical Institute for the 2016-17 school year as the terms of the agreement were not met.”
The board estimates the loss of funding for the three pools to be $530,000.
Toni Wharton and Lisa Bernstein, co-chairs of Brown’s parent council, attended the meeting. They say they feel blindsided by the short notice. Given more time, they say, they could have fought the cuts or helped find solutions to them.
“(The pool) is part of the curriculum, this is part of their activities and to have that taken away from them, we can’t — quite frankly — figure out type of exercise these kids are going to get during the day without a pool,” said Bernstein, explaining that the pool makes up for the school’s “very small field and the rest is just a concrete area.”
Wharton’s son is set to start junior kindergarten at Brown in September, when the funding is expected to stop. “And he doesn’t know how to swim, actually, so it is extremely important to me that he not have those lessons taken away from him,” she said, adding that her daughter is in Grade 2 at the school.
The parents say they’ve reached out to Councillor Josh Matlow and would like to join forces with the other affected schools. And to work with the TDSB before next year’s budget decisions to possibly have next year’s operating costs covered by the board “while we figure out what’s going on, on a long-term basis,” Wharton said. “It was raised by the TDSB staff, but they’re fully expecting that this is the start of what’s to come,” she added of the 30 other school pools, as the city and the board are to re-evaluate their schoolpools funding agreement in June 2017.
The province does not provide school boards with any money for pools, and, in order to save them, a deal was first struck with the city back in 2003. With files from Verity Stevenson