On a warm summer day, bicycles are stacked on the sidewalk in front of Bluejacket Pool, the center of a cozy neighborhood on the western corner of Overland Park.

Jennie Punswick has been going to this small outdoor pool with her six children for 18 years. Her son used the money from his first communion to buy popsicles at the concession stand. Now she sees former neighborhood children bringing their children to Bluejacket.

“I remember all the swimming lessons our children had here and sitting with women who are now my best friends,” she said.

But she and more than 800 of her neighbors said goodbye to Bluejacket Pool this month. The 51-year-old pool – which leaks 1,500 gallons of water every hour – was closed.

It is the third pool to be closed in Overland Park since 2013. The city has four pools left for a population of nearly 200,000 people. Within the next 10 years, the city plans to close the Stonegate pool as well.

Instead, Overland Park is relying on larger and nicer swimming pools in the region to replace the closed pools.

Smaller public swimming pools in urban areas are disappearing due to rising costs and are being replaced by mini water parks designed to provide more citizens with a swim using less tax money.

This is the most recent cycle in the development of swimming pools in the region. It began with large, functional pools for the (white) public. Then the desegregation led to exclusive country clubs and other private pools, as well as some public pools in the neighborhoods.

Today, the consolidation of smaller swimming pools into larger aquatic centers creates valuable and more modest gathering places that recall artifacts from the Bluejacket warriors of another era.

What’s next for Bluejacket Pool and other pools in Overland Park?

The Bluejacket Pool has been facing closure for about a decade after Overland Park created its parks master plan and determined that its collection of pools needed modernization.

Four of the seven municipal pools – Roe, Marty, Bluejacket and Stonegate – reached the point where repairs would have been too expensive. Three have been closed. The fourth, Stonegate, has about ten summers left to operate.

In the meantime, Overland Park is expanding two of its remaining pools. The master plan also called for a new, larger aquatic center south of 151st Street, but that project has not yet moved forward due to a lack of demand.

Young’s Pool will receive an improved children’s play area as well as larger bathrooms and locker rooms to increase capacity.

The city’s master plan calls for new water attractions, such as a lazy river and new slides at the Tomahawk Ridge Aquatic Center. Similar facilities are recommended for the new aquatic center to the south.

The city is still considering what to do with some of the closed pools. The Roe Park pool has been replaced with a wading pool, and Marty Pool will be replaced with a renovated park.

Bigger – but fewer – swimming pools in Overland Park

Some Bluejacket Park neighbors are unwilling to give up their community pool and are taking their fight to the Overland Park City Council.

A citizen group called Save OP Pools is urging people to email their city council members and take a survey on aquatics presented by Overland Park to help decide what should happen to the park after the pool closes.

“The great thing about this pool is that it’s a community pool,” Rachel Shuck said. “We come here several nights a week, pack peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, eat dinner here and swim, and it’s just easy.”

She fears that these regional swim centers are becoming increasingly overcrowded and overcrowded, so she handed out flyers for Save OP Pools at the recent Bluejacket Splash Bash.

However, if Overland Park wanted to reopen Bluejacket Pool next year, repairs would cost about $35,000, including basic maintenance and the cost of all the water and chemicals that would leak from the pool throughout the year.

The city could patch the leaks, but that would only be a temporary solution because the leaks are “everywhere,” Parks and Recreation Director Jermel Stevenson told the Community Development Committee earlier this year.

If Bluejacket can’t be saved, Shuck wants it to remain as some sort of community gathering place. She said the city could build a temporary shelter with restrooms.

“I don’t want there to be a wading pool, but if we need something, a wading pool for the residents of the community would be nice,” she said. “I really hope it will be a pool. But if that’s not possible, hopefully some of the other things can be done.”

The transition from small public swimming pools to larger regional aquatic centers is part of Overland Park’s parks master plan.

The plan also recommends that area public schools make their swimming pools more accessible for neighbors to use.

Stevenson said in an email that by building larger regional pools, the city could offer a wider range of amenities to more residents.

In addition, maintaining and staffing a large facility is easier than maintaining a large number of smaller swimming pools with different repair schedules and structures.

This trade-off is all the more attractive when some of these smaller neighborhood pools have fewer people swimming and tend to be concentrated in overlapping neighborhoods.

Overland Park is not the only city taking this approach.

According to Danielle Doll, a spokeswoman for the National Recreation and Parks Association, regional swimming pools have become three times more common in midsize cities over the past five years.

The number of cities with outdoor swimming pools remained largely unchanged during the same period.

Emily Schaffhausen, who lives in Lenexa but takes her kids to Bluejacket Pool where her friends live, isn’t opposed to a bigger pool. But she doesn’t want Overland Park to go too far with the upgrades.

“It’s almost more stressful for a mom with young kids because you’re wondering, ‘Where is everyone?'” she said. “I might like a slide, some diving boards, a climbing wall or a basketball court, but not so huge that it gets out of control.”

The decline of public swimming pools

It wasn’t long ago that the United States invested millions of dollars in public swimming pools. But that changed in the 1950s when the country desegregated swimming pools and encouraged white communities to create exclusive private club pools.

This led to an erosion of public swimming pools, which were gradually replaced by private ones, says Jeff Wiltse, a history professor at the University of Montana who wrote a book about the consequences of racial segregation in public swimming pools.

Swope Park Pool in Kansas City was built in 1941 with a grant from the Works Progress Administration, which was created during the Great Depression to create jobs and improve infrastructure. The federal government contributed $400,000 (worth nearly $9 million today).

At the time, the pool was racially segregated. Black swimmers were banished to the smaller Paseo Park pool near 18th and Vine Streets. This pool was so crowded that children were only allowed to swim for half an hour at a time so that everyone had a turn.

In 1954, three black residents of Kansas City sued the city over its racially segregated swimming pools, and the courts forced the city to integrate its pools.

But some white swimmers didn’t like having to share the pool with others, and after the Swope Park Pool was desegregated, they stopped coming.

Instead, they opened private swimming pools in country clubs and homeowners associations—many of which excluded black members. And over time, these private HOA pools replaced public pools.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, if they wanted to disguise their reasons, they could say, ‘You have to be a resident here to be a member,'” Wiltse said. “Many clubs specifically stated in their bylaws that membership was limited to whites, and that was legal.”

The U.S. Supreme Court concluded in 1973 that a private pool club in Maryland illegally discriminated against a black homeowner who was denied a pool membership, making it difficult for private clubs to keep their pools racially segregated.

Yet the legacy of racially segregated private pools – and the resulting decline of public pools – continues to this day.

Overland Park has four publicly funded swimming pools, but at least ten private pools owned by homeowners associations, most of them in the more affluent south part of the city.

This plays a role in the city’s decision as to where swimming pools are needed and where citizens already have sufficient options available.

Stevenson said the city’s master plan for the parks takes into account the availability of private pools operated by country clubs and homeowners associations. It also takes into account whether there are public pools in other surrounding cities.

For example, the Flat Rock Creek Pool in Lenexa could also be used by people who live near the Bluejacket Pool, while most of Olathe’s public pools are not easily accessible to residents of southern Overland Park.

Punswick said whatever happens, she hopes the outpouring of love for Bluejacket Pool will at least serve as a guide for Overland Park’s future plans for its aquatic facilities.

“Many of the neighborhoods south of us have big, beautiful swimming pools,” she said. “We don’t. We need this. This is an important part of our neighborhood.”

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