Despite gains, challenges remain with staffing lifeguards and swim instructors at Oregon pools

Portland Parks & Recreation opened its seven outdoor pools last Wednesday, and announced that it was now offering more swim lessons than in the past two years at its outdoor and indoor pools. Heading into summer, the outlook for staffing at the district’s pools is brighter than last year. Boosting starting pay for lifeguards by nearly $3 an hour, and expanding recruitment efforts has helped, although demand for swim lessons continues to outpace availability. Springfield’s Willamalane community pool and indoor water park are similarly not back to pre-pandemic staffing levels, although a hiring bonus and paying for the 40-hour lifeguard certification course — and the time to complete it — has helped boost enrollment. The Molalla Aquatic Center has hired 25% more lifeguards this summer than last year but has had to reduce the number of swim classes it can offer because of difficulty hiring certified instructors.

Joining us to share regional perspectives on lifeguard staffing and meeting the demand for aquatic recreation this summer are Andy Amato, aquatic program supervisor at Portland Parks & Recreation; Brandon Lemcke, aquatic program manager at Willamalane Park and Recreation District in Springfield; and Melissa Georgesen, executive director of the Molalla Aquatic District and aquatics section president of the Oregon Recreation and Park Association. Elandea Estrada-Duff also shares her perspective as a lifeguard working at Willamalane Swim Center in Springfield and Camp Harlow in Eugene.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Summer swim season is here, and after a series of pandemic-canceled or heavily affected years, this one is looking better. Portland Parks and Recreation, for one example, opened its seven outdoor pools last Wednesday and announced that it now is offering more swim lessons than in the past two years, even though many families are still being left high and dry. We’re gonna get three perspectives right now on pools, and lifeguard and instructor staffing.

Andy Amato is the aquatic program supervisor at Portland Parks and Recreation; Brandon Lemcke is the aquatic program manager at Willamalane Park and Recreation District in Springfield; And Melissa Georgesen is the executive director of the Molalla Aquatic District. She’s also the aquatics section president of the Oregon Recreation and Park Association. Welcome to all three of you.

All: Thank you.

Miller: Brandon, first, I can’t think of any aspect of public life that was not affected by the pandemic; but how were pools affected in particular?

Brandon Lemcke: Well, that’s a really good question. The short answer is pools were affected very similar to how everything else was. We were forced to shut down, and when we were allowed to reopen, we had some pretty strict restrictions on how we could operate and how we could function. And so the pandemic really did cause us to temper a lot of the things that we were able or capable of doing, simply because of the restrictions once we were able to open on how we had to operate.

Miller: Well, what about the way that in the past – pre-pandemic – the pipeline worked, in terms of how you would create lifeguards and make sure that they were still allowed to actually be lifeguards?

Lemcke: So, pre-pandemic, we kind of relied on just, we existed, and people said, “Hey, I wanna work there,” and they would come in. A lot of times, what we actually ended up needing was, they would come in with their certification already in hand. And that means they already went to a class, got certified as a lifeguard, said, “Hey, I wanna work there,” applied for us, and we did our background checks on them, and said, “Yeah, we will hire you.”

And, during the pandemic, we noticed that that really wasn’t happening. And so we kind of had to flip our hiring model on its head, and look at what are the barriers for individuals to get into this position. And we identified the cost of the certification – which was ranging, around the state, anywhere from $50 to $200 – as well as the fact that lifeguard class is anywhere from 28 to 40 hours or more, depending on how many people are in the class.

And so we said, “What can we do to eliminate these barriers?” And so we said, “Let’s hire them, pay for the certification.” So, we’re eliminating that barrier, because 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds, even if it’s $50, that might be a barrier that is insurmountable. So, we’re gonna hire them, eliminate that barrier. And we’re also going to pay them for their training because they’re already employees. So not only is the certification cost covered by us, but they’re also getting paid to do the class during that time. And we noticed that changing the model to doing it that way really, really affected our hiring process. And we did this both for lifeguards and swim lesson instructors.

Miller: Melissa Georgesen, what does it actually take to become a lifeguard? I mean, what are the physical or class-based prerequisites?

Melissa Georgesen: Well, that’s a great question. You have to be comfortable on the water, so you have to actually know a little bit of swimming. The two main strokes that we look for when we’re evaluating candidates are swimming the breaststroke and swimming freestyle or front crawl. And we ask the participants, or the lifeguard candidates, to do those swimming strokes for about 300 yards. So that can be quite a few laps in the pool. If a swimmer is a little weak, they may not be able to get past that.

Miller: That’s about 12 lengths of a regular pool.

Georgesen: Yeah. I’m a Red Cross instructor. There’s a couple of other certifying agencies. Their prerequisites may be a little different, but in Red Cross you have to do a swim. It’s untimed, you just need to show us that you can breathe and be comfortable in the water. We ask you to retrieve a ten-pound diving brick from the bottom of whatever pool you’re training at. So if you’re at a pool that’s a little deeper, you may be going down 12 to 15 feet to get that brick off the bottom. You have to bring it back to the side, and that is a timed event. And then the last one is to tread water without your hands. So, a lot of times we see swim team kids who are very successful in a prerequisite training because they already have the strength and ability to do this. But what Brandon’s talking about at his agency, a lot of times we get candidates who need help swimming. And so we have all adapted and now we’re helping lifeguard candidates get ready for the test before they even come in for the class.

Miller: Andy Amato, I have a feeling a lot of our Portland area listeners are already gonna know the basic answer to this question. But, for the purposes of this conversation, can you just remind us what last year was like in terms of staffing and options for Portland’s indoor and outdoor pools?

Andy Amato: Sure. You know, last year we were operating still at about half of the staffing level that we were pre-pandemic, which is a couple-100 folks that we were short staffing-wise across our 11 pools. And so we had to make the decision last summer that we were only going to be able to offer swim lessons at our outdoor facilities and not at our indoor facilities, that we were not gonna be able to offer any open play-swim times at our indoor facilities and again, just keep them at the outdoor facilities. We have made great strides this past year. We are now offering swim lessons at our indoor facilities as well as our outdoor facilities this summer, and are offering some limited placements at our indoor facilities, as well as our full schedule at outdoor facilities.

Miller: As we heard from Brandon, one of the big changes that they implemented at Willamalane was to basically make it a lot – to get rid of all the friction of training and can pay people to get trained. They were employees, as they were getting trained. What have you done to try to bump up the number of lifeguards?

Amato: We did a couple of things, thanks to the Parks Levy that was passed in 2020. That, first of all, allowed us to reopen from the pandemic. So that was step number one. But that also allowed us to reduce the cost of the training classes as Brandon mentioned. Our class now basically has a refundable deposit. It’s a $40 fee that you pay – as long as you show up, regardless if you pass the class or not, that $40 is refunded back to you. Once you get that certification, you get hired on. Each year that you need to renew your certification, we pay for that certification and we pay for your time to do that recertification.

And then the other big thing that happened, with help [from] that levy, was we had a very substantial increase to our wages from last year to this year. Our starting wage for our lifeguard increased almost $3 an hour. Which, between all of those things, really gave us a nice bump into our staffing levels from last year to this year.

Miller: Who do you feel like you’re competing with for lifeguards? I guess I’m wondering about private clubs, for example.

Amato: I think we’re competing, especially here in the metro area, you’re competing with everybody out there, any business that is looking to and willing to hire folks as young as 16 years old. So, not only are we competing with other agencies that may be close by to us, whether it’s private clubs, we’re also competing with fast food places, retail stores, all of those different businesses that are all right around our facilities. So there’s a lot of competition. And we were finding last year that we were, if not the lowest, one of the lowest in terms of pay rate.

Miller: And that’s why you bumped it up $3.

Amato: Mmhmm.

Miller: Brandon, how much time did you have to spend last year? Just staring at a weekly, or a daily, or a monthly schedule and trying to piece hours together?

Lemcke: Oh, wow. I don’t think it is exaggerated to say hours a day, and that’s when it gets to me. I have two supervisors and two coordinators that work underneath me that were doing the vast majority of that stuff and they would probably spend most of their work day piecing it together. So, I don’t think it’s exaggerated at all to say that it was probably most of my working day to try and piece this together.

Miller: Is it still like that?

Lemcke: It has gotten a lot better. With us implementing all the stuff that we’ve implemented, we’ve also started to do some hiring incentive types of things to get people in the door and through the doors. And with everything that we’ve put in place, we have actually found that we’re able to take a little bit of a breather right now. Now, it does not necessarily mean that we are back up 100% to what we were. We’re probably around 80-85% of where we’re at. But it does allow us to operate and it does allow us to offer the services to the community members of Springfield.

Miller: Melissa, I want to turn to lessons – I think which is separate from lifeguards. I mean, a lot of the skills may overlap, but there’s also very specific things – you need to know how , you need to be a teacher to do swim lessons. What is availability for lessons like right now in Molalla?

Georgesen: We are at capacity for lessons because our pool is a little on the smaller side. So we’ve kind of maxed out all of the space that we have. I am still probably short three to four instructors for me this summer and we still have community members. Molalla is small and it’s in rural Clackamas County – 10,000 people in the city, over 20,000 in the aquatic district and I still have people on waitlist for us. I still have clients who can’t get in at the right time or right level because we have to limit our class sizes to five or six kids. So even out here, we’re seeing that parents are still not getting those classes that they really desperately need for those kids.

As we all know, our kids were affected when the pools were shut down during the pandemic. We weren’t running swimming lessons. So there were a couple of years where kids did not get lessons. So we’re kind of seeing this backlog of parents want it, kids need it, and we’re doing our best to staff it, but we’re still coming up a little short.

Miller: And Andy, there are various ways to think about that. One is, it would be great if my 11-year-old could get better at the front crawl or she wants to join the swim team someday and she wants to work on butterfly. But the more serious questions are, my five-year-old has just had very few options to be in the water and is afraid of the water, and I’m afraid they could drown. I mean, do you think about a kind of pandemic-created water safety situation?

Amato: Yes. I think we all definitely feel that – as Melissa mentioned, it was two years, for the most part, where no one could offer swim lessons. It did create a huge backlog. And we are trying to do our best focus on making sure that those beginning levels of lessons are what we’re trying to prioritize. And as we know that our demand is astronomical right now, I mean, it’s more than we could handle. Even with full staffing, I don’t know that we could handle the demand that is out there right now.

But every time we bring on another swim instructor that gets hired and trained, and we are able to open classes, the first thing we look at is the waitlists. And what is the classes that are the most heavily demanded – which are those beginning classes. And so when we have a teacher and we can open a class, that’s where we are opening classes is to accommodate that beginning class because I think that we will all say, making sure that everybody is water-safe is a top priority for any aquatics professional in the state and in the country.

It breaks our hearts every time we hear of a drowning, a near drowning, or anything, in a pool, in a river, in a lake. And so I think we’re all trying our hardest as we can, and we have the capacity, to be able to get those folks that need those beginning skills in as best we can.

Miller: Well, Brandon Lemcke, what are you doing to create more swim instructors?

Lemcke: Well, that’s a really good question. One of the things that we were lucky enough to do was, at the beginning of all of this, we didn’t just focus on trying to get more lifeguards in. We focused also on the exact same things that I laid out earlier, but with swim lesson instructors as well. And right now, we have about 40% more swim lesson instructors than what we had pre-pandemic. And so we’re offering the same amount of classes that we offered pre-pandemic and we are actively expanding those classes right now. Similar to what Andy and Melissa have both said, even with us offering the same amount of classes, with a little bit of an expansion at the moment – and prior to the pandemic, we would have about 100 people on our wait list, but now we’re at about 1,800 people on our wait list. And so we are seeing an unprecedented demand for these swim lessons.

And so I’m very happy to lay out and announce that we are actively expanding these lessons. We’re looking at ways to move the lessons over to – I operate two facilities – and so we’re looking at moving some lessons back over to another facility. We’re looking at offering expanded times for our lessons and we actually have three people that we just hired for lessons again. So we are continuing to kind of beef up some of these instructor pools and we’re really lucky in the fact that we can expand. It’s just finding space to expand right now – that’s the limiting thing for me is finding the space to do it.

Miller: Brandon, Andy, and Melissa, thanks very much.

Georgesen: Thank you.

Lemcke: Thank you, Dave.

Amato: Thank you.

Miller: Brandon Lemcke is the aquatic program manager at Willamalane Park and Recreation District in Springfield. Melissa Georgesen is the executive director of the Molalla Aquatic District. And Andy Amato is the aquatic program supervisor at Portland Parks and Recreation. We’re gonna end with one more perspective on pools. Elandea Estrada-Duff is a 19-year-old lifeguard working at Willamalane Swim Center in Springfield and at Camp Harlow in Eugene.

Welcome to the show. How long have you been a lifeguard?

Elandea Estrada-Duff: I’ve been a lifeguard for about three years now and I’ve been with Willamalane approaching a year.

Miller: Why did you want to become a lifeguard in the first place?

Estrada-Duff: It kind of started with Tia Heather back in Pendleton where I grew up, kind of just offering it to me and my cousin at the same time, being like, “Hey, you guys grew up with the pools. How about now you start working for the pool?”

Miller: Do you remember when you were – so you grew up going to a pool, indoor or outdoor?

Estrada-Duff: It’s the outdoor pool - Pendleton Family Aquatic Center.

Miller: Do you remember when you were, like, 10 years old? What you thought about the lifeguards?

Estrada-Duff: I honestly looked up to them because a lot of them were also my swim instructors when I was doing swim lessons in the morning. And then I would see them on stands and I would think they’d be like the coolest things ever.

Miller: [laughing] Which makes sense that you wanted to sort of follow in their footsteps when you were old enough.

Estrada-Duff: Yeah, that’s definitely – I would say that’s accurate.

Miller: How much of what the job turned out to be was what you imagined it?

Estrada-Duff: I would say a very slim portion. Like, yes, you see them up on stand watching the water. However, there’s a lot more that you don’t always see, like there’s trainings that they need to be aware of and they need to be able to respond to any type of situation that may arise, whether that be a first aid or someone losing keys or something, you need to be prepared. And so that’s not something you always get to see when you’re just swimming around in the water.

Miller: Do you remember the first shift when you were on your own? You weren’t still at the apprentice level with a mentor, it was just you.

Estrada-Duff: I do. I was honestly kind of terrified because I still had a lot of questions and there was a lot of things I didn’t get to see, because you can only prep for so much without seeing everything. And so I was terrified. I was like, how am I going to respond to a situation that would arise if this happened, or if X, Y, and Z happened, how do I need to make sure I’m ready to respond?

Miller: That was going through your mind as you were up there?

Estrada-Duff: Yes.

Miller: What are you paying attention to? I mean, maybe it’s too long a list to give us everything. But what are the big things that you’re scanning for when you’re up there?

Estrada-Duff: Obviously the patrons in your water, you need to make sure that they’re safe, that they’re performing to an ability that’s gonna sustain them within the water – because the water, while it’s easy on the body, it’s not forgiving. So you need to be aware of what their swim levels are. What activities are they participating in? Is it gonna lead to something that might cause an accident or a potential drowning? But you’re also needing to be aware of the deck around you. Because while the water is a primary zone of ours, we also have deck zones that we need to be conscious of too because as you have seen, kids will go running, or someone – something will happen on deck as well. So, when you’re scanning, you’re watching the water, you’re watching the deck, and you’re watching for patron safety at all times.

Miller: Was it hard at the beginning? So you were 16 when you started?

Estrada-Duff: I was 17.

Miller: 17. Was it hard to have older kids or adults see you as the authority?

Estrada-Duff: Oh, it definitely was. You would get talked down to a lot because they would still see you as a kid. And so that’s definitely a struggle that I see within my younger guards as well, is them trying to be authoritative but also not trying to step on the toes of the elders.

Miller: What do you think are some of the common misconceptions people have about lifeguarding?

Estrada-Duff: That it’s easy.

Miller: What do you mean?

Estrada-Duff: It’s definitely – so, a lot of people just see the guards on-stand. And while they’re not always physically doing something, their mind is being – like I was talking about earlier with my experiences – they’re trying to make sure they can respond to everything that might arise in being prepared, in what they might need to do for themselves. So while it’s not physically draining, it’s very mentally taxing.

Miller: How do you feel at the end of a shift?

Estrada-Duff: It honestly depends on the shift. None of my shifts have been the exact same, just because situations have arise that don’t always arise whether that be a first aid, a patron needing something, or 88 patrons are needing some type of accommodation. And so some days I come home and I’m a little tired and then there’s other days where I want nothing more than to just curl up in bed and recharge.

Miller: We heard from the head of the Willamalane Park and Recreation District, Brandon Lemcke, about what it was like to do scheduling last year – hours and hours a day on his part, and many more than that, and the people under him, just to schedule and I think also to plug holes when people couldn’t come in. What was it like for you?

Estrada-Duff: It could be definitely annoying and stressful at first, that you’re already dedicating so much time to guarding and then you’re being asked, “Hey, can you come in and fill this three-hour shift or this five-hour shift? We’re really short-staffed.” And so sometimes that would be really hard to do. And then there’s the flip side of maybe I needed a shift covered for whatever reason, and trying to find someone to cover that for me would also be just as hard because people are already hitting their maxes or they just can’t because they have other obligations, too.

Miller: We heard the two different overlapping ways that people who run pools and pool systems are trying to get more lifeguards: paying them more and also paying for training. What do you think it would take to increase the number of lifeguards or swimming instructors?

Estrada-Duff: I honestly think that’s something that is not gonna be a worldwide change or aspect. It depends on the facility, the district, what is their community needs. And so while a higher pay would be nice in theory, can you sustain that pay? And then paying for training, I think that’s one of the best ways because that – as Brandon was talking about earlier – limits that burden on the shoulders of a 16-year-old kid who may not have that type of funding. And so answering that question is not just a, this is the one answer. I think there’s multiple answers. And that’s a bigger conversation that needs to happen.

Miller: Do you ever think that now there could be 11-year-olds who are watching you thinking, “Oh, she’s really cool. I’d like to do that someday?”

Estrada-Duff: I hope so.

Miller: How long do you plan to keep lifeguarding?

Estrada-Duff: That’s also another great question. So right now I am doing all my [prerequisites] for nursing, so it could vary from another few years to maybe a couple more years because I am also a lifeguard instructor – meaning I can train, so I might hold on to that for a little bit. But if I want to pursue a career in nursing, I do need to let go of it at some point. When that is, I’m not sure.

Miller: Will you be sad to let go of it?

Estrada-Duff: It definitely will be. There’s some part of the job that, once you’ve done it long enough and once you find what makes you a worthy guard of it and all that, you start to appreciate what you do. I would assume it’s the same for a lot of other jobs. So walking away from it one day will be hard.

Miller: Has it changed the way you approach being in a pool?

Estrada-Duff: It definitely has. I find myself that when I’m the one just swimming around, I’m also noticing what the guards are doing, if they’re being taken care of, having water, being cool. Are they scanning the water as well? Are they doing what I would want to do?

Miller: Elandea Estrada-Duff, it was a pleasure talking to you and maybe I will swim in a pool of you guard one day. I would feel very safe.

Estrada-Duff: I would hope so.

Miller: Thanks very much. It’s Elandea Estrada-Duff. She’s a lifeguard at both Willamalane Park and Swim Center in Springfield and at Camp Harlow in Eugene.

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