Lake Effect News

By LORRAINE SWANSON

Editor

Swift School Principal Harlee Till (left to right), 48th Ward staff aide Nancy Meyerson, Ald. Mary Ann Smith and Rep. Harry Osterman, holding daughter, Katie, cut the ribbon at the grand re-opening of the newly renovated Swift swimming pool during a community-wide celebration on Thursday.

Nearly 20 years ago, George B. Swift Specialty School was small, dingy and overcrowded. Seventh and eighth-graders were exported to Senn High School. Classrooms were made wherever there was space. The auditorium was a gap-toothed smile of broken seats scavenged for parts.  The second-floor was infested with pigeons. And forget about art and music. In Edgewater, it was every school for itself.

Today, Swift students are academic champions, taking top honors in the CPS’s Citywide Academic Olympics. There’s a glee club, the Swift Singers, and student artwork lining the walls. Test scores keep climbing, no small feat for a school where students hail from 32 different countries, many who arrived in Chicago two years ago with no winter wear, and speak 40 different languages at home. There is also a sparkling new building addition, so classes no longer need to take place on the auditorium stage.

“This school has come a long way from the days when teachers brought toilet paper from home to stock the school’s restrooms,” Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48^th Ward) said.

Thursday, Swift reclaimed another lost resource, a swimming pool built during the 1930s by another era of parents who pooled their own money during the Great Depression so that the children of Edgewater would have a pool in the neighborhood that they could walk to and swim.

The Mary Ann Smith Aquatic Center at Swift School.

The two-year overhaul cost $1.2 million, $600,000 of that appropriated from Smith’s ward menu money. The pool, pool deck and locker rooms have been renovated for school and community use. Starting in January, Swift’s fourth through eighth grades will begin using the pool during gym class.  And, the school is taking orders for water aerobics, swimming lessons, family, senior and adult swim for when the pool is available in the evenings and on weekends for neighborhood residents.

Swift Principal Harlee Till credited Smith for the pool’s reconstruction. “She convinced the powers that be that our pool should be opened. This whole celebration is in her honor,” Till said. “We decided that because Ald. Mary Ann Smith was so instrumental in making this a reality at Swift School, that the pool at Swift will forever be known as the Mary Ann Smith Aquatic Center.”

“Of course, my big, deep dark secret is that you’d never get me in a bathing suit,” Smith said, clearly surprised.

Turning serious, Smith said, “The parents of Swift in the 1930s with their own money built that pool because they wanted their children and the children in the neighborhood to have the very best. They loved them so much and we love them no less.”

Swift Elementary School Pool Dedication