Earlier this month Carrie Purdy, the head swimming coach at Matanzas High School and head of Flagler Fluid, the swim-team organization that trains local students at Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club, personally submitted a business proposal to the School Board that would have Fluid take over and run the club, gradually relieving the district of financial commitments over the next five years.
The board voted to close public membership access to the club a few weeks ago, ostensibly because the club was losing money. The club is still losing money in the board’s current arrangement, and has lost substantial revenue.
Though it had a chance to discuss it at workshops since, the board never mentioned the Fluid business plan. Instead, Flagler Technical Institute, the district’s adult education division that oversees the club, rather suddenly launched swimming lessons there, both competing with Fluid’s program and crowding out some of Fluid’s long-established lane time in the pool. A cynic might suggest that the district was being intentionally vindictive, since the business plan had also noted that, under Fluid’s management, FTI classes would not be allowed to compete with Fluid there.
“Fluid Team has utilized these swim lanes at Bell Terre specifically in the same time slot for five years,” Purdy told the School Board Tuesday evening. We’ve deliberately operated when the facility is closed to avoid conflicts.” FTI, she said, was scheduling its classes in such a way as to require Fluid to relinquish one of its swimming lanes, “which means placing seven to eight youth swimmers in one lane.”
FTI’s requirement seemed to run counter to district policy. There’s a provision for private groups like Fluid to relinquish space for “district events,” but FTI is somehow classifying regular classes as an event. That raises a question about the purpose and fairness of the system, Purdy said, “if the facility usage can be overridden at any time.” Ironically, Fluid is largely a feeder program for the district’s swimming teams.
When Purdy and numerous Fluid team members spoke of the matters to the board, most of the speakers testifying to the importance of the program and its benefits, the board again seemed ready to evade the issue. It neither addressed the specific concern about schedule conflicts nor mentioned the business plan. The board also couldn’t give a clear answer to a board member’s request for further discussion at a subsequent meeting, though that board member, Sally Hunt, was herself confused.
She was not entirely to blame: it’s likely that even the superintendent was unaware of the conflict at the swim club, though if board members and the superintendent despise one thing over any other, it’s to be caught unaware over a public issue in a public forum: one of the board’s own divisions had provoked a conflict that was now exploding in he board’s faces.
“I really don’t even quite know what all you guys are talking about,” Hunt told the Fluid group during a three-minute ramble about, among other things, Florida as a swimming environment, about Palm Coast lacking pools, about influencing elections, and about what Palm Coast and the county could do to help, though both have already said they’re not interested in bailing out Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club.
“I as a board member, I’m a solutions person,” said Hunt, one of the three board members whose solution it was to end the club’s life as a community asset after a quarter century. “We have a lot of board time spent whether it’s conversation here, whether it’s public comment, on pools. I think I’m just asking, is there a next step? Is there something we can do, that our district leadership can do, that we can do? Is there any thing we can do? Because right now listening to everybody, there are lots of demand. There’s a lot of demand for this one facility. And so I just, so that a month from now, two months from now, six months from now, eight months from now, it’s not–I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I just want us to find a solution. And if we need to be leaders in that, how can we do that?”
Even fellow-Board member Christy Chong, who had also voted to close the facility to memberships, was confused. Moments later, she had applauded one of the Fluid speakers even as Will Furry, the board chair, was admonishing the crowd for applauding. Now Hunt had her perplexed. “I just need clarity on what we’re talking about,” Chong said. “Are we trying to build another pool?” Furry said he was just trying to hear board member requests for discussions at future meetings.
“This board has from day one always supported these programs, using our pool,” Furry said. “Never was a once a moment where we said we don’t want our facility-use partners to use the pool. We’ve actually made the pool now a student-focused facility, which should open up more access to some of these programs.” And yet somehow Fluid’s faculty and students were saying the reverse had happened.
As is often the case when the board’s rookies appear uncomprehending, Colleen Conklin proposed a way out: “Can we maybe come up with a clarifying procedure for groups like Fluid so that when they are utilizing the use of facility”–the district’s rental procedure for facilities it rents out–“that they have the whole facility, that they’re not sharing the facility?” Conklin asked. She said resolving the conflict could be the topic of a future workshop.
Superintendent LaShakia Moore cautioned: A discussion about the use of facilities’ method would be fine, as long as it is not focused on a single program, and that it applies district-wide to all programs. “Because we have many different organizations that utilize our facilities,” Moore said. “Tonight, we’re we’re listening and we’re hearing about the pool, but we have the same demand on our fields, the same demand on our gym space. And so we can bring forward and we will be bringing forward use of facilities in the fall, and we can have that conversation. But I think it’s going to be important that we look at use of facilities in its entirety and not just one specific area of that.”
That’s fine, Conklin said, but the issue at hand here and now is Fluid’s conflict at Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club, where it is renting the space, it is paying for the space, yet the agency to whom it is paying its fare is creating a conflict over Fluid’s use of its allotted space. “Who knows if this is an issue on the fields, or in other facilities? This is the first time I’m hearing that there is a conflict in scheduling,” Conklin said.
Hunt appeared again unaware that her vote had closed the pool to “retirees doing laps,” as she described them, when she said that everyone, including those retirees, had to share limited space. In fact, if anything, closing the facility to broader public use should have amply provided time for remaining programs to operate unhindered–unless FTI scheduled programs differently. None of the board members asked for district staff, who are usually in the room, to provide explanations.
By the end of the discussion, when there had still not been any mention of Fluid’s business proposal, it was still not clear whether or how Fluid’s conflict would be addressed, or when the board would discuss such conflicts. Only that there would be a discussion about all that at an upcoming workshop. Earlier in the discussion, Furry, who, as chair, has some control over the agendas, flexed his muscle in that regard even as he claimed to “honor” colleagues’ requests for discussion items: “This request may or may not make the next agenda. It could be agenda six months from now, but if it is a request, it’s something that I want to note and honor that,” Furry said.
There was no such thing as a six-month delay under previous chair’s watches: when a board member sought a discussion and a majority agreed, the item was on as near a workshop as was possible. Fluid’s conflict, for now, was not resolved, though by the time of that workshop, FTI could well have chosen to resolve the matter on its own: it’s in its power, and probably to the benefit of all concerned, to do so.
