Teenagers aren't joining the workforce, and Carson City pool programs are suffering

Summer is a time for ice cream, bike rides, carnivals, and of course, swimming. However, there is a shortage of lifeguards nationwide so extreme that pool programs are in jeopardy of shutting down.

“We are a part of the aquatic community that is suffering right now,” said Mike Freeman, Recreation Program Manager at the Carson City Aquatics Center. “We have a lack of teenagers wanting to enter the workforce and our barriers of entry are higher than most.”

The barriers he refers to are that, unlike a job at a fast food joint or a department store, employees must be trained ahead of time to become lifeguards, and must know how to swim.

The Lifeguard Certification training normally costs $150, but due to their lack of staffing, training is being offered at cost of $70.

In previous years, Carson High School offered the lifeguard training as a P.E. credit for students, but the school decided to end its program a few years back, and since then, the pool has been hurting.

“We were able to have great staffing numbers coming from there,” said Tami Jennings, Recreation Program Supervisor at the aquatics center. “We’re at the point now where we’ve pretty much worked through all the staff that came from that program. That’s had a huge impact on our staffing numbers.”

Teenage employees have moved on, either to college or into the adult career world, leaving vacancies in their wake. Many of them, due in part to their experience with lifeguarding, end up joining health field careers, whether as EMTs, nurses, paramedics, or in other related fields, said Jennings.

Due to those vacancies and staffing limitations, certain measures were already forced to be taken in terms of program cut backs, despite the fact that funding is not the issue in these cases.

Normally we’d open the outside pool in the first week of May,” said Freeman, “but this year we’re either not going to be able to open it in the first week, or we’ll have to have a reduced schedule.”

A reduced schedule would look something like, Tuesday and Thursday mornings, or Monday and Wednesday evenings, said Freeman, which would be dependent on when staff would be available.

“It hurts everything,” said Freeman. “It makes the indoor pool more crowded. Also, people like swimming outside, it’s part of the fun of swimming.”

It could also impact swim lessons, not only in quantity, but quality.

“We like to have more experienced swim instructors lead lessons, and newer instructors shadow and learn from them while helping with students,” said Freeman.

Without enough staffing to even lead as many swim classes as they would like, and without the newer instructors working as aides during classes, the quality of those classes would go down.

“We have to look at how to make the lessons safe with the limitations that we have,” said Freeman.

Which would more than likely mean smaller class sizes and fewer overall lessons.

“We have to keep people safe,” said Freeman. “Not just under the Nevada State Health Code, but also under our own moral philosophy, which is keeping people safe. We won’t program things if we can’t do them correctly.”

During this school year, with the pool’s reduced staffing, and the renovations which the pool needed to be closed for, Jennings said that they were forced to offer almost no swim lessons, something she has never seen before in her 20-plus years of working with the pool.

Finally during March, she said, they were able to scrape together enough instructors to hold a swim lesson session, but they were forced to close the therapy pool, or warm pool, during lesson times simply because there weren’t enough lifeguards on duty to watch both pools.

“It has a community impact,” said Freeman. “Who am I to say what’s more important, lessons or the therapy pool? So we have a battle and a give-and-take between those user groups as well.”

The goal, Freeman said, is to raise awareness of staffing shortages so that they won’t need to choose between what stays open and what closes anymore.

Not only that, but a skeleton crew of lifeguards puts extra stress on the few consistently working.

“We don’t want to have a burnout situation with the staff we rely on most during the middle of the summer,” said Freeman.

Jennings noted that nationally, more and more pools are hiring senior citizens to work as lifeguards due to the fact that they have the time to dedicate as retirees. There are a few seniors on staff at the Carson City Aquatics Center, and they may begin to gear toward hiring more from their demographic if teenagers continue shying away from the workforce.

They hope to hire quite a few new employees for the program, somewhere in the ball park of 60 employees. At present, there are 50 or so employees on staff, but some of them aren’t “active,” whereas some may only work a few hours a week, and others are cashiers or work in other departments.

The minimum age for lifeguards at the Carson City Aquatics Center is 15, and the next lifeguard certification training is scheduled to begin on May 1, which would be Wednesday nights and Sunday days, running for about three weeks, said Freeman.

To learn more about becoming a lifeguard, visit www.carson.org. To apply for the lifeguard position, click here.