Affordable swimming lessons less and less accessible in B.C.

Learning how to swim is a life skill and it’s often important to parents that their children grow up and know how to swim.

However, access to affordable swimming lessons has become harder for many parents in B.C.

Public pools, especially indoor pools, are expensive for municipalities to build and operate and for years there has been a shortage of lifeguards and instructors.

In addition, many communities that do have pools are now giving residents of their city priority lesson registrations, forcing families who live in cities without pool access to scramble to find lessons.

2:08 Lifeguard shortage impacting popular pools, beaches

“Swimming lessons is a life skill that everybody should have the opportunity to register into,” Kimiko Hirakida with the Lifesaving Society of B.C. told Global News.

“It’s going to just require a little bit more creativity and thinking about how we maybe achieve that, and looking at pools in our surrounding neighbourhoods.”

There are currently six municipalities in the Lower Mainland who give residents priority access to swim lessons.

Those include Burnaby, Coquitlam, Delta, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody and New Westminster.

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