thousands of students risk being deprived of swimming lessons

Thousands of students risk being deprived of swimming sessions this year. The company Vert Marine, which manages swimming pools under public service delegation, suddenly closed the doors of its establishments, Monday, September 5, due to rising energy costs. Thirty pools all over France made inaccessible, at least temporarily, while the first swimming cycles were to begin in elementary school and college.

In Limoges, where 270 classes had reserved slots at the Aquapolis, managed by Vert Marine, it is a “earthquake”, believes Marie-Hélène Dumas, SNuipp-FSU departmental co-secretary and school teacher in a REP-classified establishment. In the school where she teaches, the swimming sessions of six classes of CE1 and CE2 are for the moment canceled. It will be difficult to find a fallback solution because “all the slots are already full in the municipal swimming pools”she explains.

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The swimming pools that have slots available may also be located far from schools, especially in rural areas, which involves additional transport costs. For college students, there is also the constraint of timetables already established, which will not necessarily correspond with the possible availability of other pools. In the Versailles college where Stéphane Prot, PE teacher, teaches, the classes of 6^e currently have no solution after the closure of five swimming pools in the Yvelines. Gold, “a third of them cannot swim and these students will not repeat the swimming cycle in college”worries the teacher.

Prevent drowning

After two years of canceled or very disrupted courses due to the Covid-19 pandemic, professionals are alarmed. “A whole generation of students has not had access to swimming pools and this is felt when entering sixth, even second, where more and more students have not acquired the basics of “knowing how to swim” »underlines Coralie Benech, general co-secretary of the SNEP-FSU.

Benoît Falc’hun, PE teacher in Limoges, sees this in the classes of 6^e of his college classified REP: “70% to 80%” of them don’t know how to swim when they leave CM2. A public health and safety issue, while the Ministry of Sports has made “knowing how to swim” one of the axes of its policy in order to prevent drowning. But also an issue of equality, school being the only guarantee, for many students, of access to this learning.

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