Unseen Dangers at the Pool by Judy Lyden

Every year for nearly 35 years, I've taken children to our local pool. It's a great pool because it's well designed for fun and teaching swimming. The pool is crystal clean and beautifully kept. The guards are first rate, the pool management supurb, so why wouldn't I want to take my own children as I did years ago, and my grandchildren and school children year in and year out? Every year we donate about $100. in toys to the pool for all the children to play with. So what would keep me away?

The answer could be the local ladies who visit the pool much as I did in my youth. Every year these women sit across from our group and pass judgment on us. They provide a steady stream of gossip, haughty looks, and erroneous complaints. In the past they have sent hate emails, they've made angry phone calls and worst of all, my staff and I are charged with a lack of care.

What these women refuse to see is just how much we really do care about the children in our school. I don't see another single early childhood school taking their whole student body to the pool twice a week and actually teaching most of them to swim. Most places nap away a child's summer. We teach. At the pool it's swimming.

Today we had an incident that ruffled many feathers. One of our little girls decided she did not want to be wet, and a little boy splashed her. She went after the little boy and scratched his face. She was promptly told by one of our teachers, who has been teaching with me seventeen years, that she could not behave in such a manner. The child decided at that point to throw a tantrum. Because it's not safe to swim while in tantrum, she was told she could go back into the pool when she stopped. It was as simple as that. She decided not to stop. There was not a single tear.

One of the "ladies" decided to intervene. I'm sure her intentions were excellent. She was obviously very upset from what she saw from fifty or sixty feet away. She came to rescue the child from her tantrum and actually picked up the child ready to pull her away from the security of the child's teachers and friends. This presented a danger unlike any danger. It's called stranger danger. There was a strong reprove which ended in an argument about hugs and later we made a call to the police department to report the incident.

What people outside the early childhood theatre must understand is this: real teachers act on behalf of children. We are professionals who work with a myriad of problems every day. We know when one of our children needs to be hugged and when one of our children needs to sort out his or her difficulties all by him or herself. It's experience, not sugary sentimentalism that teaches best. Our teaching staff is an educated body of men and women who work together in a small school to provide the best possible experiences for the children in our care.

For thirty seven years I've worked with very young children. I've taught preschool for over twenty-five years. I'm an innovator, a possibility hog. My principal and I developed the program that takes children all over our area to see what can be seen and do what can be done because we believe that a summer is a time to discover and witness the world - even for children. At the same time we know that many of these children would not get to do these things outside of school. That includes the pool.

The pool is a teaching place for us, and because it's a public place, it's open to our children too. The numbers we bring help the pool financially, because our cost is the same as everyone else's. And because it is a public place, we deserve the same respect and the same consideration as any other family.

This week we will go to Mammoth Cave. Two weeks ago we were in St. Louis at the zoo. Parents are always invited and many of them go because that's the kind of relationship we have with our parents. It's close. We see every parent every day. We talk to parents every single day about the life of the whole child, because every child is a whole child and needs his or her daily place to care about the child enough to give him or her the very best.

How do we do it? It's a whole lot of work and a whole lot of planning goes into it. Our staff works round the clock to put together a program every single parent of a child at the Garden School can be proud of.

This year our little school won first place in the category of schools with fewer than 40 children in the Hoppining jump for Easter Seals. That's because we care about our community and the people who live here. We care as much about the children who will probably never visit a pool right down to the other children who are swimming along side us. We never complain. We mind our own business, do our work and leave.

The Garden School promise to the parents who allow us to care for their children is to continue to provide the very best of everything including pools no matter what.