Philly’s public pools are open for eight weeks, max.

Charisma Presley dreams of a city where families have access to public pools long past Labor Day, where they can swim for free year-round.

So for the past several years, Presley has spearheaded a group that keeps the conversation alive, reminding Philadelphians — and their elected officials — what the city once had, and how youths and families would benefit from having that again.

“We need year-round access and equity, and we need sustainable indoor infrastructure, not seasonal pools that leave our communities behind,” Presley said from the bleachers of a Philly rec center on a sweltering summer Wednesday before pools closed.

Presley and the other members of Friends of Philly Aquatics remind anyone who will listen of their two main goals: they want Pickett Pool in Germantown renovated and reopened, and Marcus Foster Pool in Nicetown rebuilt and reopened.

Both pools are owned by the Philadelphia School District but for decades ran programs through the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. Foster closed in 2008 and Pickett in 2019.

Friends of Philly Aquatics, the successor group to Friends of Pickett Pool, helped notch a win in 2023, when the school board voted to reopen Sayre Pool, another district-owned pool in West Philadelphia, in a deal that committed the district to spending about $11 million and the city more than $3 million.

But for now, just one indoor public pool is open citywide: at Lincoln High in the Northeast. (Two more district schools, Fels and Widener Memorial, have pools, but they’re not open to the public.)

For a time, Philadelphia’s city-sponsored swimming program was nationally renowned — so attention-grabbing that it eventually became the subject of Pride, a 2007 Terrence Howard film that dramatized the plight of coach Jim Ellis, and the challenges and triumphs the all-Black team faced.

But in real life, financing ebbed, pools deteriorated, and the program eventually stopped. (Ellis still coaches, but the city no longer runs a swim team.)

‘We’re not going to be othered’

Presley grew up in Nicetown with a community-activist mother who noticed that neighborhood kids weren’t using the Marcus Foster pool much.

“She said, ‘Kids in this community don’t know how to swim,’ and she started recruiting,” said Presley. It bothered Presley’s mom that swimming was a given in many places, but in her Black community, families were reluctant to put their children in pools.

“She said, ‘I’m not going to feel isolated like that, we’re not going to be othered,’” Presley said.

Presley and her sister became swimmers, and it enriched their lives — gave them focus and job opportunities. Pools were part of the fabric of their families, then Marcus Foster closed. At the time, the district said it was just for repairs.

But years have gone by with no access to year-round public pools, shutting off a lot of people’s access to swimming. The Salvation Army Philadelphia Kroc Center does operate in Nicetown, but “why are we privatizing swimming?” Presley said — not everyone can afford to join a private pool.

Presley’s grassroots coalition — folks who swam at Pickett and Foster, people for whom swimming is an integral part of their lives — is modest.

But they are consistent. Members of the Friends of Philly Aquatics — including Presley’s three school-age children — show up at school board meetings and City Council hearings, making a plug for Pickett and Foster.

Empowering swimmers

Their message is landing: when Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. presented his strategic plan, Accelerate Philly, one of the action items was “pilot learn to swim programs in different parts of the city in alignment with the curriculum.”

Swimming lessons were important, the plan said, because of the risk of drowning. “Black/African American and Latino urban youth report having poor swimming skills at higher rates than their white peers, putting them at greater risk of swimming related injury or death.”

Still, in a historically underfunded district, even the superintendent publicly declaring swimming a priority has not meant much in reality. No such learn-to-swim program has been launched.

So the Friends of Philly Aquatics is plugging away, with advocacy and with learn-to-swim lessons. This summer, Presley and her sister, Cokettia Rawlerson, completed dry-land water awareness lessons with hundreds of campers at rec centers across the city.

When the sisters traveled to Ghana on a family trip a few years back, they marveled at how much swimming was part of the culture there, Presley told a group of campers at the Athletic Rec Center on North 26th Street, near Girard College.

Historically, some Black Americans stayed away from swimming, Presley told the kids.

“They told them scary stories like, ‘You’re going to sink because of the color of your skin,’” said Presley. “We’re here today to tell you that swimming is for everyone. We want to teach you how to be safe in, around and near all bodies of water.”

Friends of Philly Aquatics also took a group of 17 middle and high schoolers this summer to see Gretna Glen, a lake and retreat center in Lebanon County, central Pennsylvania, to give them exposure to different bodies of water and more confidence in swimming.

The six to eight weeks that public pools are open in the city just isn’t a sustained-enough stretch to learn to swim, the sisters said, and that has a ripple effect — it’s tough for the city to hire enough qualified lifeguards, and even those with credentials sometimes struggle.

The work feels urgent to Presley, who spends her professional life as director of Retention and Student Success at Villanova University, and to Rawlerson, who’s an assistant principal at Alain Locke Elementary in West Philadelphia.

“Lifeguards are calling us, saying, ‘I need you go to go to these pools, I need you to help,’” Presley said. “Some of the lifeguards can’t even swim the length of the pool. We’re really just trying to empower people.”

Swimming can lift the city up and be a crucial part of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s plan to make the city safer, cleaner and greener, the sisters said.

“People want to be lifeguards, but they don’t know how to swim,” said Presley. “They’re broke and bored and we wonder why they’re on the corners. We really need to start cultivating swim lessons and pools.”