Limited access starts June 15
By Greg Seubert
A phased-in reopening of the Iola-Scandinavia Community Fitness & Aquatic Center has the backing of the Iola-Scandinavia School Board.
The board on June 8 learned that the center, which has been closed to the public since March 16 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is scheduled to reopen on a limited basis on Monday, June 15. The board approved center director Tim Welch’s plan to reopen the facility.
“The main thing that we would like to do is open I guess we would call it Phase 1 June 15 through June 30,” Welch told the board. “We are going to open really close to our regular hours, but we don’t know what to expect. We hear some people are really interested in coming and then we hear a lot of people are wait-and-see.”
The Iola-Scandinavia School District operates the center, which includes leisure and lap swimming pools; a fitness center; and gymnasium.
The number of people using the center will be limited at first, according to Welch.
Limited number of people
“We’re limited to 10 people in the pool area and 10 people in the fitness center,” he said. “The gym is going to be closed. You cannot play sports at this time. We’re using the back half of the gym at this time to lay out our cardio equipment so that it’s spaced out about 12 feet apart.”
Other changes at the center include safety glass at the front desk.
“We had to put a lot of little things in to get this to happen,” Welch said. “To start, we’re going to open it to adults only. We’re going to see how that goes and get a feel for how many people are going to actually come in. Then, we’ll start taking a look at how we can start bringing the students in. A lot of that’s going to depend on what the county’s going to allow.
“We cannot offer any group classes in-person for now,” he said. “We’re going to be doing a lot of cleaning and offering all the different types of sanitation that’s needed throughout the whole building.”
Center users will have to call the facility to reserve a time, Welch said.
“People are going to have to call in, just like a tee time at a golf course,” he said. “They’re going to have to call in so we can keep track of how many people are in the building. We’re only going to allow people to call in one day in advance because if we let people call in and say, ‘I want to come in every Wednesday for the whole month,’ what if two of the Wednesdays, you decide not to come and we lose out on an opportunity because spaces aren’t used?”
County-approved plan
District Administrator Ray Przekurat said the Waupaca County Health Department is on board with the plan.
“We did get this approved through the health department,” he said. “They did tweak some of our things that we had listed and I made some suggestions, too. We’re being very careful. We’re going to play it by ear, see how it works for the first couple of days and go from there.
“We still have to have our lifeguards there,” he said. “We still will have people walking in the gym to monitor people on machines and also helping clean in those areas, too.”
Board member Mike Harbridge asked how the center will handle memberships.
“Let’s say you had a current membership when we had to close in March,” Welch said. “Now that we know when the day is that we’re open, we’ll move your membership three months ahead so you didn’t lose that time. We’re going to move the date three months ahead so people didn’t lose out on the money that they paid to use the facility when it was not available.”
Most center users will be asked to fill out a new membership form, according to Welch.
“We’re going to ask nearly everyone out to fill out a new membership form when they come in the door so that we can get current information,” he said. “People tend to move, have changes in their life and have different phone numbers and they don’t always tell us. With the situation that we’re in, we need to communicate very well with people in case there is a situation with an outbreak and somebody was in the building. We’re going to be tracking everybody that comes in the building every day, every hour so that we can do our best to notify anybody that we have to.”
Detailed information on the center’s reopening can be found on its website and Facebook page.
“I have a letter that kind of wraps this up that’s going to go out to the community upon your approval tonight,” Welch told the school board.
“It’s going to be a nice letter to the community, the county and people who visit the facility so they can see exactly how it’s going to work.
They can see what the hours are and we’ll answer a lot of the questions that way.”