On Feb. 26, The Evergreen State College announced it would close its pool — the largest south of Federal Way and the only public pool on the westside of Olympia. Students and community members were given roughly three months' notice. The pool is scheduled to shut down in June. That is not enough time to reckon with a decision this consequential, and the closure itself is a symptom of a much larger problem.
This is an 11-lane, half-Olympic facility that has served the region for nearly 60 years. Seniors use it for rehabilitation and fitness. Students use it for fitness, rehabilitation, recovery and camaraderie. The student employees who lifeguard, teach swim lessons and help run the facility are losing jobs that pay for school and build real-world skills. Six high school swim programs across four schools depend on it because their own campuses have no pools, and other facilities in the area are already at capacity. Last summer, the pool hosted the Washington State Senior Games. Olympia School District students volunteered over a hundred hours to make that event happen, and coaches had already planned a swim and dive camp this summer to teach hundreds of children to swim — a single set of lessons reduces the risk of drowning by 88 percent. Closing this facility doesn't just inconvenience people. For many, it eliminates access and opportunity entirely.
What troubles me most is that no one in a position of authority seems to be asking how we got here. Organizations have offered to pay for pool time and been turned away. The pool once hosted swim meets that brought visitors and revenue to the campus and the local economy — that stopped, and no one has explained why. Budget processes exist to prevent exactly this kind of surprise, yet the announcement came just two days after the state budget passed through committee, leaving no time for legislators to act. Why is permanent closure the first solution rather than exploring partnerships, community use agreements, or other revenue streams that could close the remaining funding gap? And why is the $4 per credit hour Recreation Fee that was passed last year to fund the pool — that was expected to generate $400k in revenue — not enough? Where did that money go? Apparently not to the pool.
As a mother of an Evergreen student and a former educator, I have watched this pattern repeat. The theater department, cut. The indoor soccer arena, gone. The bookstore, gutted. A grassroots petition with nearly 4,000 signatures urges the city council to intervene, and nothing has happened. Meanwhile, the campus grows quieter. How did a nationally recognized, groundbreaking public college reach this point?
Answering that question honestly is the only way to find real solutions. Dismantling the institution piece by piece is not the solution and only compounds the problems Evergreen faces.
Evergreen was founded as an experiment — interdisciplinary, adaptive, and built for the world as it is becoming. That founding vision has never been more relevant. At a time when artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the skills that matter, the capacities Evergreen was designed to develop — critical thinking, collaboration, working across disciplines — are precisely the ones we need most. An inactive residential campus is not proof that Evergreen's model has failed. It is proof that its leadership has lost sight of what makes the institution irreplaceable.
The pool is the canary in the coal mine. If we let it go without asking harder questions, we are accepting a trajectory that ends with the shuttering of the college itself. Evergreen belongs to all of us — students, alumni, families, and the community that surrounds it — and it is worth fighting for. Not just to preserve what it was, but to become what it still could be.
•••
Amalie O'Connor is a former educator, community organizer, state employee and the parent of an Evergreen State College student. She lives in Olympia. O’Connor is part of the Save the Evergreen Pool grassroots community campaign, which formed after Evergreen announced the pool's closure in February.
