Dear Principals of the Sequoia Union High School District and the Palo Alto School District and Menlo Park and Palo Alto City Councils, I am writing to you to ask for your leadership in opening high and middle school swim pools this summer for structured, safe, organized participation in order to help get our youth back to normalcy, exercise, and routine needed for their mental health. Cities and public schools must work together to open up facilities as quickly as possible for youth who have already been locked down for over three months; every day that passes makes the situation worse. Isolation, lack of routine, and lack of exercise are impacting our youth mentally and physically. As a middle school teacher, I see signs of depression in students, and within my own children. Not only has their academic lives been completely upended, but their ability to exercise doing the sport they love has been taken from them. As a mother of two swimmers, including a collegiate athlete and a young age group swimmer, I cannot begin to tell you how devastating the impact has been to them. A New York Post op-ed two days ago made the point more succinctly with the headline: Our leaders ignore the high price kids are paying for coronavirus lockdowns. The CDC has been clear from the very beginning of this pandemic that chlorinated water is safe. Weeks ago, the CDC announced that the coronavirus does not spread easily from surfaces at all. Yet our local city and high school pools (in addition to parks and playgrounds) remain closed to the local swim teams that called them home. By city representatives and school leaders proactively working together to quickly open these pools, local youth can begin to have a return to physical and mental health that they have not had in over three months. I am imploring you-- our community needs your leadership. Our youth, whose needs have been largely ignored, need you. Safely open school pool facilities and make them available to our community. We talk a lot about the mental and physical health of our young people. It is time to show leadership in actually finding ways to make it better. Erin Glanville Received on Tue Jun 09 2020 - 10:02:57 PDT
