Irving ISD discussed partnering with the
YMCA to build a natatorium at a recent board meeting.
IISD's Scott Layne brought the idea forward and it wasn't long before he was ambushed.
Board president
Steven Jones went out of his way to torpedo the project, which is still in early planning stages. Jones wants folks to believe the pool would be built to serve just over a hundred kids in the high school competitive programs.
Bullcorn! Jones is no idiot - he knows exactly what the new pool will mean for kids in the district. For whatever reason, he's going out of his way to put the brakes on the project before it can gain momentum.
The proposed natatorium would provide learn-to-swim, lap swimming, club swimming/diving, and recreational swimming opportunities for the community as well as water safety and competitive swimming/diving programs for the school district.
To see school board poly-ticks in-action, watch the video
here.
Jones starts in with
"My only comment..." and then rambles on and on
against the project -
and the swimming program.
He does a nice job of widening the split between academics and athletics.
We've all seen it work on small scales (within individual schools) as well as large ones (legislation out of Austin).
Guys like Jones provide the spark, then stand back and watch the burn.
If the swimming community in Irving needs motivation to get Jones off the school board, he provided it with this statement:
"I mean, maybe we cut the program. It's very easy to bring to the board to cut German. To cut Latin. I mean, you understand where I'm coming from? And, that's a teacher's salary. That's not very much money, but yet we've got a hundred kids - a hundred fifteen - that swim and we can't think about cutting that."
Jones is anti-athletics. He's anti-aquatics. Irving-area swim folks need to either turn him away from the dark side or run him off.