Sorry, I still see building single-season swimming facilities as a waste of money with negligible long-term benefits for citizens. Why can't the city and school districts team up to build shared indoor facilities that could be used year-round by student teams and by citizens during school hours and after team times? School districts can build multi-million dollar football stadia and every high school has multiple gyms for basketball, each sport played by student athletes and a tiny (relatively speaking) percentage of the population involved in college and pro teams. Each involves the risk of serious acute and long term injuries that can seriously and negatively impact health. Swimming and water sports in general can be enjoyed the whole life and can contribute positive health benefits. What sort of agenda is being pushed by elected public bodies with budget discretion for the future health of the population?
If you've been paying attention to state politics lately, the big new thing coming out is property tax reform. The means of accomplishing that which has gotten the most attention is to repeal what authorizes school districts to levy property taxes for M&O (maintenance and operations). My understanding is this includes essentially all local school funding not associated with bond payments for capital projects. Teacher salaries, learning materials, utilities, etc. If this happens, which is likely to happen eventually because of the direction Texas politics has taken, then school districts will eventually be dependent on the state for all program funding. I think it's very uncertain if Austin would be willing to fund non-academic extracurricular activities which have a extremely high cost per participant, are only present in a minority of schools, and aren't as culturally important the way football is.
The other trend is the increasing number of charter schools. There is also the likelihood that Texas will have a school vouchers program eventually. Consider that FWISD has a poor reputation and declining enrollment. I believe that the percentage of students who attend non-FWISD schools will only grow. Charter schools, especially the open-enrollment ones that focus on underprivileged areas, generally don't prioritize high cost extracurricular activities or high cost physical buildings. Private schools that take vouchers may have sports facilities including natatoriums, but you can bet that will come at a fee on top of the voucher for kids to participate and exclude the poor kids. If you look at charters, many of them don't have sports (or band or art) at all, and their campuses are usually austere buildings and smaller in size than comparable public schools. So, with that in mind, I would seriously doubt that any of these schools would be interested in going along with building a community aquatics facility. They don't even pay for fully qualified teachers, they just hire instructors to read from a pre-made instructional guide.
Finally, I think what you've said has been tried and it hasn't worked. La Joya ISD in the RGV was the subject of a news article I read a while back where they built a recreation oriented aquatic center with a lazy river, etc, sort of like the water park in Hurst. They were justifably raked over the coals for wasting scarce educational dollars in a region that really really needs to help poor kids succeed. Secondly, in the Houston suburbs that's also kind of how it works, there aren't many public pools in suburban Harris County instead the school districts like Cy-Fair and Fort Bend ISD have these huge natatoriums and they do have programs where they bus kids from only certain schools for programs, lessons, etc and exclude others. The public really doesn't have meaningful access to these facilities. They aren't open to the public at all in many cases. Another swimming pool related thing related to this I remember reading about in the Houston Chronicle when I lived in Houston is that HISD, among many other questionable things relating to building stuff that never gets used, built not one but several 25 yd practice pools inside metal buildings for high schools on the north side and then the superintendent decided they weren't going to use them, so they were built and sit abandoned.
I understand what you are saying but I think it should be entirely the other way around. I think cities and counties should fund sports and cultural venues, which citizens pay for through sales and property taxes one way or another. Then, schools and community colleges which have athletic programs would lease these facilities for a fee. FWISD, private schools, and charter schools would all line up to reserve blocks of time to use the facility. This means kids regardless of what school their parents choose to put them in, have the opportunity to participate in sports programs. It also means regular citizens of all ages who pay for these things with the taxes regardless of what entity the taxes go to actually get to enjoy them.
This avoids the politics of having to join up a facility whose real purpose is public recreation and all-ages fitness with a school system with a separate administration and demand it spend money on something that isn't directly related to education. The cost for a school district to run a natatorium and an aquatics program could pay an entire department of math teachers or an after-school tutoring network at all schools, so there is no way outside of bougie places that have gotten accustomed to ridiculous property tax revenues like Frisco ISD that this will fly.
