Stranahan High swimming pool to be renovated

Stranahan High is a step closer to getting its swimming pool back.

The Broward School Board approveda contractTuesday to start renovations, whichareexpected to cost about $1.5 million. Staff said they plan to complete the job by the end of the year.

The district closed the Fort Lauderdale pool in 2014 for safety reasons, first proposing repairs costing less than $250,000. But they soon found that years of deferred maintenance due to scarce funding left the pool in shambles far too deep to fix on that budget.

Students on the swim team have since taken buses to a different pool to practice while their home turf continued to decay. But that set-up has proven too difficult.

For the first time in decades, the school this year won’t have a swim team, said athletic director Thomas Harrison, who explained the pool ismore than just a place for team practice.

“A lot of these kids don’t know how to swim and they learn how to swim in class. That’swhere it hurts themost,” Harrison said. “With all this water around us, it should be our goal to educate every student on howto swim.”

The pool helped define Stranahan’s identity in the swim team’s heyday. Students regularly took home county awards and crowds gathered to watch competitions. The pool also served as the surrounding neighborhood’s swimming pool, saidalumnusMark Sheridan.

He and other alumni from the 1977 graduating class toured Stranahan High last weekend for their 40th reunion. Whatwas once a hub of activity today is a pit filled with brownwater, Sheridan said.

Sheridan, who competed on theswimteam andwent to college on a swimming schol-