Since the drowning of student Abdullahi Charif in February during a middle school physical education class, pool use during the school day has been suspended until the district aquatic task force committee has established a aquatics policy.

This aquatic task force committee includes stakeholders such as superintendent Rob Metz, athletic director Andy Ewald, high school physical education teacher Rich Keith, middle school teacher Derek Wennerberg, and swimming coach Joe Yaeger. Additionally, Metz said some representatives from the YMCA will come give their input on pool safety in future meetings.

So far the task force has met Sept. 30 and Oct. 15 and discussed how the district school pools will be operating during the day.

“We began by talking and listing the pros and cons of whether we should even use the pools specifically for swimming lessons and whether it is even schools’ jobs to do such,” Metz said.

By the end of the first meeting, the task force was able identify three main points it would address throughout the year.  According to Metz, the three questions are whether the school should even use the pools,  how would the new policy would work and how pools would function during the school day if they are only used swimming instruction.

Largely a focus of the second meeting, Metz said if the the issue of whether swimming instruction should be part of physical education is an important question that needs to be addressed.

“Minnesota doesn’t require schools to teach swimming, so we don’t have to use them,” Metz said. “We need to first consider why we are using them, whether it be for swim instruction of games like water polo.”

However, some students like Junior Poindexter Tomlinson do not think it should be the school’s responsible to te to teach swimming.

“I think we should keep the pools for athletics only because it shouldn’t be the school’s role to teach swimming to students,” he said.

In regard to the topic of athletics, Yaeger said since the tragedy, minimal policy was changed for the Park swimming teams.

“The only difference is our assistant coach needed to get lifeguard certification,” he said. “After school programs need to be treated differently than physical education classes and I think the committee is doing this well.”

Metz said assuming swimming is to be taught as a part of the district physical education courses, a detailed curriculum would need to be established.

“Assuming swimming will be taught, we would need to build rules about class size, how to deal with differing skill level, goals of teaching swimming and how long the swimming unit would be,” he said.

Overall, Metz said these meeting have are having positive impact on the development of district pool policy.

“[The aquatics task force meetings] help me think the issue through and consider lots of different views. But in the end, the school board will decide what goes,” Metz said. “Before the holiday season, I want to see a school board policy on aquatics.”

As of now district pools are only currently being used for community education and athletic sports.