A year ago, Baltimore County dipped its toe into public swimming when a community college offered limited hours at one pool. Now it’s making a bigger splash with free swim hours at three pools.
The Community College of Baltimore County has expanded a pilot program it began last year at its Essex campus. It’s now offering limited public swimming hours at pools in Catonsville and Dundalk, in addition to Essex, for county residents.
Baltimore County has no public pools for its 856,000 residents. It has tried to expand access to public swimming for decades, with little success. Baltimore City, by contrast, has 570,000 residents and 22 public pools.
The CCBC pool in Catonsville will now be open to the public on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6:30 to 8 p.m. CCBC Dundalk will be open on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:30 to 2:30 p.m. and again from 4 to 6 p.m. CCBC Essex will be open on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 5 p.m. The expanded hours run until Aug. 20.
Swimmers must register on the college’s website and pick up a pool card before the first visit.
The new hours amount to about 135 hours of free swim over nine weeks of summer. That works out to the equivalent of two weeks of all-day swimming at Five Oaks Swim Club in Catonsville, which typically has a two-year waitlist to join and can cost up to $745 for the summer.
But state Sen. Carl Jackson, who, along with county officials, has pushed for increased hours, called the extra swim time a “temporary Band-Aid. The fact is, we don’t have any public pools in Baltimore County.”
Growing up, Jackson and his friends walked to a neighborhood pool on the city-county line. Jackson’s 8-year-old son, Chase, can’t; his grandfather pays for weekly swim lessons at a private gym.
Baltimore County resident Rahim Booth, an aquatics instructor and longtime advocate for diversity in swimming, thinks officials could be doing more, especially given that two county-funded Y facilities in Dundalk and Reisterstown are set to close Aug. 31.
The Y could not make the improvements it wanted because it did not own either facility. Managers told The Banner that the Y was relying on donations to subsidize reduced-cost memberships for low-income families.
The county had paid $10 million to build the Y’s swim facility in Randallstown, which opened in 2009. In 2020, it invested $3.26 million to repair the Dundalk facility, a project that took five years. The pool reopened this season, only for its closure to be announced.
“It’s a start. The barrier has been reduced,” Booth said of CCBC’s expanded hours. “But it’s not enough. The city has done a great job. The county’s just not there yet.”
At CCBC Catonsville during the last week in June, the pool was filled to capacity — 70 swimmers — so families had to wait. Some just went home.
Essex hasn’t had that issue since launching the expanded hours on June 22. Between 30 and 50 swimmers show up at each session, according to John Reed, the college’s wellness coordinator.
On a recent Tuesday, Zach Morgan, a music teacher, and Riva Brown, a medical assistant, brought their three kids on a nearly 100-degree day. Cadence, 4, was tentative, but 7-year-old twins Octavia and Harmony couldn’t wait to splash around.
“We bought one of those blow-up pools, and it just wasn’t working,” Brown said. “We said, ‘You want to go swimming in the big pool?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah!’”
Jackson said record-high temperatures and several reports of children drowning in the Potomac River and in Anne Arundel County this summer have convinced him that the county needs pools, as well as low-cost swim instruction.
The county’s population is about one-third Black. Many of those families do not have access to pools. Pool memberships can cost hundreds of dollars per summer, plus a hefty bond that is returned when families leave. Membership is occasionally restricted to residents of neighborhoods — mostly white — where the pools are located.
“It shouldn’t be because of lack of affordability that people cannot learn how to swim,” Jackson said.
Lack of swimming skills can be deadly: Black children and teenagers drown at nearly three times the rate of white children and teenagers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CCBC effort is not the first time Baltimore County has tried to expand public swimming. In 1953, the county’s parks and recreation department developed a plan to construct public pools at elementary schools, sharing the cost with the education department. But 13 years later, the county abandoned the idea.
By then the county had 150 private swim clubs, many of which restricted membership to white people.
In April, the Y announced it would no longer operate the pools in Dundalk and Reisterstown.
“Ultimately, we determined that we are at our best when we can deliver to the community the full Y membership experience, and that was not possible at either location,” Dana Ashley, senior vice president of operations for the Y in Central Maryland, said in an email to members.
That was disappointing for Amanda Ann Hornsby, a data analyst who lives in Dundalk. Her son, Dominic, had just joined a swim team that the Edgemere Sparrows Point Recreation Council started at the Dundalk Y a few months ago. The Edgemere Sparrows Point Stingrays had only three swim sessions, but Dominic felt the team had jelled and that swimming was going to replace lacrosse as his main sport.
“The kids are really disappointed,” Hornsby said. “They worked really hard. And now, all the work seems to be for nothing.”
Councilman Julian Jones, who has long represented Randallstown, has said he can’t understand why Baltimore County doesn’t operate pools. Now that he is the Democratic nominee for Baltimore County executive, he is proposing to build two county-owned aquatic centers and to find operators for the two facilities the Y is vacating.
“I plan on having more swimming pools, definitely,” Jones said.
He said he’ll offer more details soon.
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