Valley Club invites youth to return to pool

A suburban Philadelphia club has changed its position about whether to let some kids use its pool.

A suburban Philadelphia club has changed its position about whether to let some kids use its pool. The flip-flop comes after criticism the Valley Club received for ending its agreement to let children from the Creative Steps camp swim at the Club’s pool. Some of those children said they heard Valley Club members make racial comments. The Club president spoke about the issue Monday on WHYY’s Radio-Times.

Listen:
[audio: 090713lfpool.mp3]

Club President John Duesler says the original decision not to have campers in the Club’s pool was made for safety reasons, not racial reasons.

Duesler: A number of children did take the deep water test and I think there were only two or three that were able to swim in the deep end. So what it left us with was a huge number of children in just the shallow section of the pool that were all together. And it just became clear to us that we didn’t have the capacity to handle all these children in one spot.

Duesler says the Club is inviting the campers back to the pool, but he did not provide specifics on how the safety situation will be different this time. A staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania says the campers parents could still decide to bring a lawsuit.