Small Schools Summer Prep

LORI’S H2O SKILLS

LORI WEBER, OWNER Lori’s H2O Skills is a warm water, indoor, year-round, learn to swim facility. We are located in Milford, Ohio. We provide the highest quality of one on one private swimming lessons in our Community. Our goal is to teach lessons to all ages of children, adults and persons with special needs and provide safety education to parents/guardians. Our in-house lessons are 15 minutes of perpetual swimming. The need for learning to swim and safety in and around the water intensifies during the Spring in preparation for Summer. Therefore, we also provide travel lessons to homes and Community pools during the Spring/Summer. We increase the private lesson visit to 30 minutes so that we can include educational safety. Travel lessons allow us to touch many more lives. Price is determined by a 10 mile radius of our stand alone facility. If someone request us to come to their home or Community pool that is outside this radius, will do that with an extra gap/travel fee. Remember to check with your insurance and liability provider to see if they include this service.

SWIM TO SHORE: LEASED FACILITY

CASIE SHORE, OWNER My California swim school resides in a cozy retail space of a mere 2500 square feet in Murietta. Although space is always a challenge for us, we love our small facility because it creates an intimate learning environment to house our private and semi-private classes. We like to launch our summer season by inviting our clients to participate in a ‘Floaty-Free Summer Challenge’. Our instructors educate the parents on all the reasons that floaty toys are dangerous and can hinder student progress while learning water safety skills. We also hype up how much fun it is to enjoy the water with their children especially in our area where the summer heat rises to triple digits. Parents are then invited to take a Floaty-Free Pledge for the summer. Participating clients take the pledge by giving us their signed floaties agreeing to commit to being 100% present and within arms’ reach of their child while swimming throughout the summer. We hang the signed floaties up inside our facility to be a constant reminder to the parents of their pledge to supervise their children. At the end of summer, all participants receive a free ice cream cone from Cold Stone!

Ready, Set, Safety, Go!

READY

Getting ready for summer means warmer weather and more accessibility to water. Being prepared, safety in and around the water and taking swimming lessons.

SET

Set your schedule to learn to swim. Make a commitment, take swimming lessons!

SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY!

Education is so important. Parents/Guardians should know all the risks of water. Avoid all forms of distractions, such as cell phones!

GO!

Have fun in and around the water!

BUBBLES TO BUTTERFLY SWIM SCHOOL

MARGEE CHARRON, OWNER Our swim school is located in Norwich, Connecticut. We began as a backyard summer program (5 years) and in the winter months, we rented various hotel pools and for 15 summers, we rented a local campground that had two pools. Currently, we are in our own 6000 sf building that is two years new. We are always excited to prepare for our summer program! In New England, we have beautiful summers, but the season goes by in a flash! Our summer session is 9 weeks. I like to refer to it as a roller-coaster ride. We feel like we are slowly going uphill with all of our planning and prepping and once classes actually begin, the ride speeds up and we have a few twists and turns (sometimes upside downs) and then poof - its over. To have a well-planned schedule and program for summer, our planning begins in January and by the end of March, the heavy lifting will be done well before summer arrives. The preparation for summer includes: • Staff Training. Always. We have a short gap between the end of spring session that we fill with training, re-certifications (Lifeguard and CPR), a full clean of the facility, on-boarding new staff and teambuilding. • Creating the summer schedule. Last summer we ran completely ‘A la Carte’ for all classes. This 20-min class option was either a Private or Semi-Private class. We thought this was a good decision as we re-opened after

Covid. The customers could choose any day, time, class for their children. They were not committed to a consistent scheduled class. Creating all of the classes was our greatest challenge - but after being shut down, anything seemed possible!

This summer, we are doing a hybrid program. Customers can choose either a nine week 30-min Group class or a 20-min Private or Semi-Private ‘A la Carte’ class. • Planning Professional Development for summer. The summer schedule has a mid-day gap that we are able to plan various trainings and development opportunities for staff during the summer.

THE SWIM CENTER

JENNIFER HILL, OWNER The Swim Center has operated out of a backyard pool for 26 years. We were seasonal only from 1995 - 2010. Then, we started renting hotel pool space for our winter season. In 2019, those hotel relationships were just too hard to maintain, so we purchased a bubble dome enclosure to operate year round out of our backyard pool. We average 450 swimmers a week during the school year and operate our pool 37 hours a week. Our instructor staff is about 140 hours a week. In comparison, our summer session runs an average of 2000 swimmers a week and we operate our pool 55 hours a week. Our instructor staff is about 330 hours a week. Below are some of our takeaways from this past year we are incorporating into our summer and fall planning: • In the summer, we can accommodate a maximum of 6 instructors at a time. We will only open a shift if we have a minimum of 4 instructors with a goal of maximizing our pool time. This means, we would rather be open less days, but be at full capacity those days. This way we are working smarter, not harder and as an owner I can enjoy more family time instead of sacrificing them for us to offer low volume classes. • During the upcoming school year, we will only plan shifts where we can run 4 instructors at a time. Our indoor dome does not accommodate as much volume as we do when our pool is outdoor, so we cannot run as many instructors.

But, for instance, in the past, we opened on W, Th and F mornings for just 1 instructor per morning shift. This year, we cut out the W and Th and put 3 instructors on the

Fri morning shift instead. I have really enjoyed my M-Th mornings off this year! This is all part of maximizing our pool time! • We will not reduce student teacher ratios, because then parents get too used to the small class sizes. If needed, we will reduce instead the number of instructors in the pool, thus cutting down on our payroll cost, but keeping the student teacher ratio the same.

• We did a price increase in May 2020 when we reopened, and we are doing another one in May of 2021. Prior to this, we only raised prices every 5 years or more. This will become more of an annual process. I might keep testing the boundaries on how high we can charge until I get serious push back, and then I can always offer “discounts”, though we never do discounts now. These are just a few of the lessons we have learned from the last year we are implementing into our summer schedule. With current all time high demand and all time low staffing, it will be a challenging summer to work at maximum capacity!