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Portland Parks & Recreation quietly discontinued a pilot program last year that allowed marginalized families to have the first chance to sign up for swim lessons ahead of the general public.
Parks bureau spokesman Mark Ross says the city ended the program because it “had key limitations,” and replaced it with a new program with similar goals but a different approach.
Among them, according to Ross: The earlier program failed to reach “new or underserved users as intended”; the parks bureau said the program was “hard to explain [and] placed burdens on partners”; and the parks bureau found “better alternatives.”
The initial program offered early swim lesson sign-up to people of color, households experiencing poverty, seniors, teens, immigrants, refugees, and people with disabilities. It ran on an honor system: “No one is excluded from signing up during the early registration period,” Ross told WW in 2023. That means the parks bureau required no proof that those who took advantage of the early registration were, indeed, from one of the groups the program aimed to help.
After dropping the early registration program last year, the parks bureau installed the new program, called Project Connect, which is similarly aimed at reaching marginalized families. It “builds on lessons learned and offers a more inclusive, transparent, and sustainable system for helping all Portlanders access services, including ADA and language accommodations,” Ross says.
The parks bureau could not immediately produce data showing how the two programs compared in reaching underserved communities, and it’s unclear whether the parks bureau even has such data. But as WW reported in 2023, the early registration program appeared to have been popular: In 2022, 46% of available swim lessons spots were accounted for in the week during which marginalized families and people were encouraged to sign up early. (The program ruffled the feathers of some parents who felt they were locked out of swim classes previously available to them.)
Project Connect, the new program, appears to lean on outreach to increase access for marginalized communities, rather than a window of preregistration.
The program, according to the city, sends parks bureau staff to local community events to spread the word about parks services; emails community leaders who can then pass that information along to their communities; and holds informational sessions at community centers.
The parks bureau defends its decision to discontinue early registration.
“Early registration participation data isn’t directly comparable to the broader reach of Project Connect,” Ross says. “More quantitative data will be available in the coming weeks, and our qualitative experience is that the increase in the number and types of access points for underserved communities, from Schools to Pools, to partner-led programming, and orientation events, will improve access to PP&R programs.”
