Could there be a more circuitous path or a more contentious battle over a high school swimming pool than we have endured and are enduring in the multi-year debacle leading to the Nov. 8 referendum over Oak Park and River Forest High School’s pool plan?
Painful to imagine.
That said, and with some reluctance, we endorse the pool and facilities improvement plan put on the ballot by a sincere, though often frustrating, school board at District 200.
We start with the unflinching belief that this school needs a new swimming pool. The two current pools, oddly placed on either end of the large fieldhouse, are 88 years old and utterly obsolete. We continue with the realization that on this constricted and landlocked little campus there is no simple or easy place to construct a new swimming pool. No matter which option you consider, and the school has looked at plenty over 10 endless, meandering years, something is in the way, something needs to be sacrificed. And we’d close by stipulating that every option is an expensive option. Building a new swimming pool is simply going to be the single most expensive infrastructure investment a high school makes.
The proposal on the ballot calls for a pool that is smaller than pool advocates wanted and bigger than opponents believe is necessary. The board’s compromise on pool size — forced, we’d say, by a determined and organized opposition — allows the pool to be built alongside a newly constructed, though somewhat smaller, parking garage on the current site of the school’s only existing garage.
We have a tough time swallowing the demolition of a perfectly good and not very old parking garage. But we also know that an earlier school board plan to simply blow up the garage in favor of a super-sized pool and push 260 cars back onto neighboring streets was ridiculous.
And it is the on-and-off ridiculousness and indecisiveness of a succession of OPRF school boards — particularly on the pool but also chronic over-taxation, a timid approach to the academic achievement gap, and a confounding take on overall facilities planning — that makes this proposal vulnerable to second-guessing.
The manifestation of that second-guessing in this divisive election campaign is seen in the Pragmatic Pool coalition. They think the board’s proposal is too big and too expensive. From our point of view, though, the fatal flaw in their solution is that their plan — rebuild and upgrade the two current pools in essentially their current locations — is the very worst idea among all that have been floated over the entirety of this century. It just doesn’t work and it doesn’t save enough money to justify its shortcomings.
The second argument of referendum opponents is that OPRF has, at the very last moment, appended a poorly-thought-out facilities improvement aspect to the referendum. In fact, there are monies here that focus on more space for a burgeoning fine arts program, some added classrooms and investments in athletic locker rooms. While facilities planning and the pool process ought to have been wedded years ago, there is logic in the plan put forward by the board.
Finally, there is the argument that the referendum plan ought to be defeated as a lesson to the school that its purported focus on elite swimming comes at the expense of facing serious inequities at the school. We believe the current school board was elected to tackle equity and has only been reluctantly dragooned into endless pool debates. And so we’d argue that this reasonable, though imperfect, pool plan ought to be approved by voters so that the endless pool distraction can be resolved and the school board, administration and our community can turn its full fire on equity.