By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
There may soon be new management for open swim at Brandon High School.
On Monday night at the school board of trustees meeting district superintendent Dr. Matt Outlaw announced the current pool management contract with Aqua Club will be renegotiated.
“Moving forward, the question mark is about open swim,” said Outlaw. “What’s really important about open swim is that this standard Aqua Club contract says that Aqua Club is not going to manage open swim, does not mean we’re not going to have open swim.”
Outlaw says the primary reason for negotiations is the cost to the school for open swim times, which cost the district around $64,000.
“The current contract is children’s services, the contract also includes adult open swim,” said Outlaw. “We would save $64,000 that we spend on our current contract and we also have an opportunity for revenue, a month rental fee. We are hopefully going to have about $82,000 in the positive for the school district.”
Though the contract would not cover open swim, Outlaw says they have been in talks with members of the community who had ideas about how to run open swim moving forward.
“We’ve communicated that it’s not being eliminated, but it’s going to be different. What we want to propose is to separate Aqua Club and open swim,” he said. “It can be rented, it could be used by the public, but we get out of the business of Aqua Club running open swim. We engage with the people in the community, talk about what some of those options might be, probably recommend that they reach out to an organization like Parks and Rec, something like that, to help organize whatever it is they’re going to do.”
In the contract, Aqua Club would only handle children’s programs, since that is the main interest of the school.
“Our business is for k-12 education. That is what 100 percent of our dollars come in for, is for kids. We don’t get a single nickel for anything other than children. So we’re proposing that Aqua Club continues to run the children’s program, and they focus in on that area, but then, for open swim, that we look to do something different,” he said. “What I’m also recommending is that the district no longer subsidize that non-children program, that we would not put money into paying for open swim management. We would continue to pay for everything running, pool maintenance, lights, all that stuff that we already pay for, we would continue to do that, but we would not pay for the lifeguards and the manager for open swim.”
The contract has not yet been voted on by the board.