Swimming, smoking and school budgets …

A Spectrum, by Mike Chmielewski

Swimming? Good! A life-long healthy activity. Not many detractors.

Smoking? Bad! Bring up the word and controversy ignites. Health impairing? YES! NO!

School budget? Ugly! If you've been to budget hearings you know what I mean.

Swimming, smoking and budgets. What can we learn from these three?

Swimming and smoking have something in common. They often begin at a young age. They both persist as a life-long habit. Both are choices. Learning to smoke isn't officially taught in school. It's a free choice. Or is it?

Since we don't have courses on how to smoke, cigarette makers are willing to spend much money to get us smoking at an early age. Seems to work pretty well.

Swimming? Like smoking, a choice. Not much advertising by comparison. Oh sure, there's some encouragement with occasional public service notices, but you get the picture. Not much immediate dollar profit to be made by hooking kids on swimming.

And budgets? Where are the few, the fortunate few, that have learned to make the money pie bigger? Remember your early family budget discussions? How did you make more money available? How did you learn to budget? Was it easier when jobs were plentiful?

My guess is there were times you did without. And other times when a new job or switching priorities allowed you to do more with more or less.

Let's put all three together. Since we don't need smoking classes in school you might think we would have room for swimming. Sorry. Students are not filling the pools. Swimming has disappeared as a high school course. And those popular swim courses often had waiting lists.

Students want to pick up the swimming habit. Yet the Mat-Su School Board, of which I'm a member, is not funding a swim program within the school curriculum. Is the answer to have cigarette makers fund swimming programs in return for free advertising in school lunchrooms? That's a connection I don't want to make.

Maybe the answer lies in the way we talk about budgets. How do we meet all of our increasing needs by growing our resources? How do we decide that swimming is worth the price and find a way to pay? How do we dialogue with one another?

We can be like two radios facing each other with the sound turned up, the noise from one having no effect on the other. Or we can listen to the sound of music and be changed.

I've found that to be listened to and to be heard is one of life's greatest experiences.

So what happens at public meetings? You go and the forum does not provide for dialogue. What happens when one or both sides stop listening? One perspective repeated over and over, louder and louder is not dialogue. The result is a hardening of position. Have you been there? Have you stopped listening? I notice my own struggle to listen. And by the way, listening is not getting ready to say the thing that will one-up the other person.

So, what does swimming have to do with daily life in the Mat-Su

Borough?

Everything. Swimming is a vital sign about the health of our community. If we think we're doing well as a community, and students are not learning to swim, we may need to think more deeply. We may need to look at the process we use for dialoguing and deciding, for budgeting.

How can we create successful swimming programs? Or properly fund schools and pay employees? How can we turn our community-wide forums from harangues about the lack of legislative support to focus on community priorities and ways to pay for those priorities?

When we talk with a legislator, school board member, or assemblyperson we can speak, listen, change and do it all over again as a habit for the rest of our lives. We can advocate for our own needs and recognize opportunities to share resources. Or we come away from a public forum having spoken our piece without learning anything to improve our understanding. We will have not been in a dialogue. There is no change.

And then there's smoking. You don't really have to listen. You just hear dimly the refrains repeated over and over. A lot like politics. Hard hitting sound bites and soft oft-repeated themes. But dialogue?

I apologize for those times I have not listened well. I can do better. Can you? See you in the forums and at the pool.

Mike Chmielewski is a Palmer resident.