Swim strong with schools: partnering with public schools to create water attractions can help alleviate budget issues while strengthening commitment to community.

As most public school districts across the nation are struggling with tighter budgets, competing against each other to attract and retain students and looking for ways to generate revenue, one school district in Michigan has decided to invest money in the community as one way to offset its budget shortfall.

Huron Valley Schools (HVS) in Highland, Mich., has found a unique way to maximize the return on investment from one of its best and most underused assets--the school district's swimming pools.

"As our community continues to grow and budgets continue to shrink, there is more of a demand on the school districts to not only provide academic excellence, but to also partner with the community to improve the residents' quality of life," says Dr. Robert O'Brien, superintendent, Huron Valley Schools.

That demand on HVS was even greater since the communities do not have city-operated parks and recreation departments to fulfill the resident's needs.

"The district essentially operates as the parks and recreation department for these communities," says Paul De-Angelos, director of communication, Huron Valley School District. "In this capacity; it was up to us to create recreational environments that would benefit our students and the community."

Typically, a high school swimming pool is only open to the students during the competitive swimming season. This leaves the pool dormant for nearly nine months out of the year.

"It is a tremendous asset to just have lying there and only used by such a small part of the population," O'Brien says. So, HVS decided to turn the pools into family destinations that could be used by the entire community, every day of the week, throughout the entire year. In the summer of 2004, Milford High School in Highland, Mich., and Lakeland High School in White Lake, Mich., opened their new indoor pools and fitness centers to the public.

But these aren't your ordinary high school swimming pools. While each still has a competitive pool, these 98,500-square-foot facilities also feature fitness and weight rooms, field houses, indoor tracks and eye-popping water attractions that are rarely seen inside high school campuses.

Visitors of Milford's Pool and Fitness Center are captivated by a zoo-themed water attraction. A towering 16-foot, 2,000-pound gorilla with a 100-foot long snake slide and an interactive fort with its own life-sized elephant and rhinoceros that blast water, keep families entertained for hours.

Guests at the Lakeland Pool and Fitness Center can explore outer space by crawling around a two-story comet water attraction and water-blasting Martian guarding a spaceship.

These uniquely themed swimming centers were designed to not only increase revenue for the school district, but meet the needs of the growing community and provide a safe place for the whole population to laugh, explore and get active together.

Developing Community-Based Recreation

Huron Valley Schools is composed of 18 schools and about 11,000 students from Commerce, Highland, Milford and White Lake. HVS has a rooted commitment to being a leader in the community, as evident with its slogan, "As Goes the Schools, So Goes the Community." Once the district identified the problem that its students' and community's athletic, intramural and recreational needs were falling behind those of neighboring school districts, the HVS board decided to conduct a community survey in March 2001.

The survey confirmed residents' desire to have the schools' aquatics facilities available to them and gave the school district the support it needed to introduce a bond issue for upgrades to both academic and athletic programs.

In September 2001, voters approved the largest bond proposal in the school district's history.

"The approval of the bond issue was a key step in this process," O'Brien says. "It is always a challenge to justify to voters the need for additional funds. But it is even more so when we are talking about funding for programs outside of the classroom."

Adding themed public swimming centers offers the school and community enormous benefits, including:

* increasing property values

* strengthening the overall health of the community

* providing a place where anyone from toddlers to seniors can participate

* engaging all ages and abilities

* creating a safe, fun and creative year-round environment

* keeping the school district competitive with comparable surrounding school districts

"With the addition of community pools, fitness centers and field houses, the district was also allowed to extend its commitment to fitness to the community as well as the students," says Janet Roberts, ABC, APR, director of community relations and fund development, Huron Valley Schools.

Immediately after the bond was passed, the district went to work on remodeling the aquatic facilities.

But the residents' input did not stop with the approval of the bond. The school district continued to encourage residents' involvement as it partnered with KoalaPlay Group of Englewood, Colo., and Play Pool Products from Splashtacular of La Quinta, Calif., to originate themes for the two centers.

Creating an Enticing Atmosphere

Creativity and imagination reshaped HVS' high school swimming pools into a wild zoo adventure and outer space escape. The district and its students collaborated with KoalaPlay Group and Play Pool Products to create the one-of-a-kind water environments.

"The themes for the swimming centers were chosen by our students, who were able to provide creative input and explore their imaginations," says O'Brien.

The most dramatic element at Milford High School's pool is the larger-than-life gorilla, which is more than three times as big as the average adult male gorilla. This towering animal stands tall as king of this water zoo, with a snake slide slithering around its feet. A fort-themed water play area is just feet away. Toddlers all the way up to seniors can climb through the structure and activate water jets, fill and dump water buckets, spin water wheels, and blast streams of water at each other.

While travel to outer space is several years away, a visit to Lakeland High School's pool brings visitors up close and personal with the cosmos. A water-blasting Martian guards the space ship, while a two-story comet slide blazes across the sky. This outer space theme is completed with replicas of planets such as Saturn and Pluto that splash swimmers as they play nearby. Guests can also enjoy climbing aboard a partially submerged rocket as it moves up and down. Opportunities abound to squirt water, pull levers, and play on an alien ship and "space speeder" interactives.

"This truly was a collaborative effort producing dramatic results," says Hal Shapiro, director of Play Pool Products. "The students input helped to create two awe-inspiring attractions that are fun for the whole family."

Both water worlds are designed using a flexible, modular water structure that will enable the school district to upgrade or make modifications quickly and inexpensively over the lifetime of the attraction. As the district's budget and user demand grows, the patented design allows owners to consistently expand and refresh their attraction to drive increased traffic and higher profits.

The pools, with their fresh themes and collection of interactives sprinkled throughout, invite year-round play in the climate-controlled environments.

Becoming a Greater Asset to the Community

Indoor water parks are the fastest growing trend in the water play industry. Originally gaining popularity in the resort and hotel industry, the benefits of indoor water parks are quickly catching the attention of municipalities and public school districts.

As one of the first installations of its kind, HVS' pools are paving the way for others considering indoor water attractions as a way to deliver family-oriented recreation in their communities and to increase revenues.

In just the first month of operation, HVS quickly signed up more than 3,000 members of all ages. The school district is not only pulling in residents from Milford and Lakeland, but people from other surrounding communities are also buying memberships for the facilities. The membership and attendance numbers are far exceeding projections for the first year.

The district is relying on membership enrollments, facility rentals and class fees to offset the cost of operations and eventually lead to a surplus to help fund other district programs.

With the absence of traditional parks and recreation departments in these communities, HVS is using the recreation facilities to offer a variety of "Learn to Swim" and youth age group swim programs as well as men's basketball and women's volleyball leagues.

Considered showcases for how public school aquatics centers can escape the "one size fits all" approach to pool design and use themes to appeal to every age group and build revenue, HVS' pools are truly community centers rather than high school pools.

And although the school district operates the pools in this situation, there is great potential in the idea for other community park and recreation departments can use innovative theming to partner with their own local schools to alleviate cost and drive profits for both entities.

TIPS FOR FUNDING A FAMILY AQUATIC CENTER

There are a number of options a public school district can consider to help fund a community aquatic facility. Everything from fund raisers and bonds to grants and private donations can offer districts sufficient funds to build a year-round, family-friendly water attraction.

Perhaps the most widely used method of funding today is the issuance of a school bond. When voters pass a bond, it guarantees funds will be available for specific projects. But getting a bond passed can also be a long and complicated process.

Huron Valley Schools (HVS) in Highland, Mich., recently used bonds to secure tax dollars for its academic, athletic and recreational improvements.

"We devoted about 18 months into passing our bond," says Janet Roberts, ABC, APR, director of community relations and fund development, Huron Valley Schools. "To be successful in getting the bond approved, we believed it was essential to spend time informing the community and building support from the beginning."

Since the school district was asking voters to approve the largest bond in the district's history, HVS begin building community support through first, conducting two community surveys. The surveys helped HVS identify community needs, gauge the level of support for its proposal and find the areas where it would need to focus education efforts on in order to successfully pass the funding measure.

Next, the district created a grassroots organization of parents and community members who volunteered their time to educate the community and serve as liaisons to the school board. HVS also held several public forums where it invited members of the community to share their input and get involved in the process.

Armed with community feedback from the surveys, volunteers and public forums HVS assembled a panel of experts to review the bond proposal.

"The district also did something very smart and that was to build the bond into the district's Strategic Plan process," says Doug Pagel, director of key accounts, KoalaPlay Group. "This enables the district to provide sound rationale behind the need for the bond issue and lay the foundation for how integral the bond would be in helping the district achieve its future goals."

After months spent educating staff, parents and the community on why the bond was needed and getting input from the experts, HVS was finally ready to put the bond to the test.

"The final step was to put the bond measure on the ballot and see if our efforts paid off," says Roberts.

In September 2001, voters approved the bond and HVS was able to begin building two pool and fitness centers. In the summer of 2004, HVS opened both centers.