At the Shallow End of the Lifeguard Pool

Officials Struggle to Fill Deck Chairs as More Students Shun the Sun for Resume Friendly Internships

Julia Jurgovan, 17, keeps an eye on the action at Bethesda Pool. Unlike a growing number of students, she says she'd rather work by the pool than get an office job: "I'm doing something that I love." (By Katherine Frey -- The Washington Post)

Getting paid to sit at the pool with friends while perfecting a tan used to be the premier summer gig for high school and college students. But with many feeling increased pressure to have an office job on their resume, lifeguarding has suffered a blow to its reputation.

A lifeguard shortage has left many pools in the Washington area scrambling to fill their deck chairs just as peak swimming season begins. D.C. public pools opened Monday with about 140 lifeguards, far below the aquatics department's goal of 250, which it had no trouble reaching three years ago.

Although officials said all District pools will operate on schedule for the next few weeks, they did not rule out the possibility that attrition later in the summer will force them to close the deep ends of some pools during certain hours. That happened at several pools last year.

"As we get into daily operations, lifeguards generally start to take off" because they realize the job is not for them or leave town to return to college, said Harold Houston, chief of aquatics for the District's Parks and Recreation Department, which pays first-time guards $9.80 an hour. "And we don't have enough people to support that."

Other jurisdictions in the area and across the country report similar problems.

For the second year in a row, half of the outdoor pools in Reston will close for the season once the city's college-aged lifeguards head to school in mid-August. Montgomery and Prince George's counties have started offering financial incentives for teenagers to enter lifeguard training programs. In Columbia and Arlington, officials have had trouble recruiting. And long stretches of New York City waterfront are closed to the public this summer because there is no one to patrol them.

Lifeguard supervisors agree on two main reasons for the decline in the number of students applying for poolside jobs. Increasingly, students trying to boost their chances of attending elite colleges and getting prestigious jobs are applying for summer internships, even as early as the minimum lifeguard age of 15. And many cash-strapped public school systems have closed their pools and learn-to-swim programs, producing a smaller number of teenagers who can swim well enough to pass the entrance exam for lifeguard training courses.

"They may do lifeguarding for a summer and really enjoy it," said Tina Dittmar, a member of the American Red Cross's national aquatics advisory group. "But then it becomes, 'Do I do this internship at a law office, or do I lifeguard?' And we're going to lose that contest every time."

Adam Geboff, 22, counts himself in the group Dittmar described. He quit his summer lifeguarding post of three years as soon as he found what he calls "a real job."

"I'm working for a government contractor doing decently important things relating to my major, so it's really not a comparison," said Geboff, an electrical engineering and computer science major at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. He is working at CACI International in Alexandria this summer.

Several area aquatics directors said they have to recruit almost an entirely new lifeguarding staff every year because so many students go the route Geboff did. That means most of the people watching from the deck are first-year lifeguards who are upperclassmen in high school.

First-time lifeguard Julia Jurgovan, 17, said she has no plans to rush into an office job even after she heads off to college. The rising senior at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, who makes $7.80 an hour, said she spent most of her childhood swimming and was bored by her short stint working in a cubicle.

"Being in an office wasn't fun, and now I'm doing something that I love," Jurgovan said, adding that lifeguarding might look just as good on her resume as sorting mail would.

Nacal Lawrence, an 18-year-old manager at Fort Lincoln Pool in Northeast Washington, said he will eventually quit lifeguarding in favor of a job related to his biology major at Ohio State University. Still, the rising college freshman said, staffing his pool wouldn't be a problem if more of his classmates knew how to swim.

"They come in to do a test, and they stop halfway through," Lawrence said. "They just never really learned."

Local pools are putting a greater emphasis on learn-to-swim programs in hopes of alleviating the lifeguard shortage. In the past two years, aquatics directors in the District, Montgomery and Prince George's have launched pre-lifeguarding programs to prepare young teenagers for the Red Cross-certified course.

Aquatics directors have created other aggressive recruiting measures as well. Tara Eggleston, acting director of three pools in Prince George's, said staff members pass out fliers at schools during lunch hour, attend job fairs and approach students at swim meets to try to fill lifeguarding needs. Montgomery offers free lifeguard training to students who promise to work for a year.

"Recruiting has to start with keeping our eyes on kids who are total pool rats when they're 8 or 9 years old," Dittmar said. "We don't have people lined up around the block for these jobs anymore, so we've got to get [kids] involved by hook or by crook."