Yesterday, I went down to our public pool at Kellis Park. A small place with a little cement brick guard house, two or three guards on duty, three drink machines, and a couple trees, our local pool could perhaps accommodate 50 swimmers. Not as fancy as Forest Park, but not as crowded, either.

I was surprised to meet, while I was there, with a girl I had been teaching in music last spring. I asked her where she lived. “Over in the South Side, over by the school,” she said. “My dad had the day off today, he drove us out here.”

“Isn’t there a pool closer to the school than this?” It’s about eight miles, after all. No, there is not. This is the closest for her family.

Of course, and perhaps sadly, many of the type who make spending decisions in this city have never considered going to the public pool, since they have their home or a club or an association to patronize, so they have no concept of the fact that most of the 78,000 students in the FWISD will not be going to the pool this summer, because they would have to be driven there by their parents, who are busy, or don’t have a car, or are at work, and because the pools are too few and too small for the need, which means they are overcrowded and this impairs lifeguard’s ability to enforce rules and keep the peace.

I’ve heard that the City is about to cut its budget, so I suppose this is a crazy time to suggest that investment in parks infrastructure, pools to be specific, is indicated. But honestly, how much of the $1.2 billion budget of this city would be needed to beef up the pools? We’ve just had a huge repair job done on the drainage to West Creek Road two blocks from me, when in fact, no appreciable problem existed with the drainage or the paving, whereas the vast majority of Fort Worth’s children have no effective access to public swimming or swimming lessons this summer or any of the 7 summers we have been here.

The City has spent plenty of money on police (recently having announced that no money will be cult from the police budget, naturally). Is law enforcement perhaps considered more important to our City fathers because there is no private way of hiring a police force, and there is a private way of getting your kids to the pool?

This is a reminder to those city councilpersons who are working on the budget that for most of Fort Worth’s schoolchildren, private pools are not available. And when you create a city where there is no safe place for children to recreate and play, you are creating a city which will have a much greater need for a police force.

A stitch in time saves nine. Please consider taking a look at Kellis Park Pool, or at the crowded conditions at Forest Park Pool, and consider whether this is an adequate level of public pool service for a first-rate community.

In the town where I grew up, we had three public pools for 50,000 people, or one pool for every 16,ooo people or so. Here in Fort Worth, we have 7 for 750,000, or about 1 pool for 100,000.Does this seem like not enough swimming? I think we can do better.