Ransom Everglades Faces Scrutiny Over ‘Community Pool’

Once hailed as a model of student-led outreach, the private Coconut Grove school’s Broad REACH community pool now serves few who are unable to pay. Critics say the spirit of the promise — and the access — has dried up.

Fifteen years ago, as Ransom Everglades School lobbied – in the face of fierce neighborhood opposition – for city approval of a massive Olympic-sized swimming pool at its seven-acre, bayfront campus in Center Grove, school officials dangled an enticing offer: 

As part of the project they would build, at the school’s own expense, a smaller, adjacent “community pool” accessible to less privileged families throughout the Grove and beyond.

The plan worked. Two years later, in January 2012, the school’s $12.5 million, two-pool aquatics center officially opened. 

“This pool,” reads a small plaque beside the smaller of the two pools, “was built to be shared with the whole community as an expression of Ransom Everglades’ commitment to instilling in its young people the ethic of giving more to the world than one takes from it.”

But that largess, some say, was short-lived. What began as a wide-ranging program of year-round swim instruction and pool access for families throughout Miami-Dade, has been, at best, sporadic. 

While a small handful of students from outside the school accessed the pool this year for after-school swim instruction, community use is nothing like the organized, year-round programming that former students and staff members say welcomed children from across the county in the years following construction.

“It was embedded in the culture,” says former Ransom Everglades Athletic Director Claude Grubair, recalling the commitment to outreach and volunteerism at the school in the years following the pool’s opening. 

Illustrating this, he says, was the school’s willingness to arrange and pay for transportation – a key hurdle for many groups from less advantaged neighborhoods.

Ransom Everglades alumna Ashleigh Johnson, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and the first African-American female to play for the U.S. national water polo team, recalls devoting weekends and weekday afternoons after high school practices helping teach children to swim. “It was fun to give back and Ransom made it a regular thing to be involved in the community. It felt integrated and something that I hoped would continue.”

Among those now disappointed is Ruth Ewing who, as chairperson of the Elizabeth Virrick Park Committee, has lobbied for access to Ransom Everglades’ community pool while the park completes the renovations on its own pool. 

“The communication would stagnate and nothing would happen,” says Ewing. 

Also frustrated is Davey Frankel, a Ransom Everglades alumnus and now a school parent. Since 2022, after opening his own backyard pool for private swim lessons for an underprivileged family, Frankel, who says he only recently learned of the community-access pledge, began prodding reluctant school leaders to open its pool to needy groups. 

Ransom Everglades Head of School Rachel Rodriguez and Chief Operating Officer David Clark both declined to be interviewed for this article. A school spokesperson did not respond to detailed written questions about the community-access program other than to say arrangements were being made to facilitate use this summer by a range of nonprofits.

By most accounts the early promise of the school’s Broad REACH Community Pool was a sincere one, rooted as much in a commitment to leadership training at the 122-year-old school as in a simple spirit of altruism. “Broad” is short for its principal donor, the Shepard Broad Foundation; REACH is an acronym for a student volunteer organization – Ransom Everglades Athletes Can Help.

“Our desire was not just to have a big Olympic pool, which speaks somewhat of elitism, but to train the leadership class to give more to the community than it took from it,” former Ransom Everglades Head of School Ellen Moceri, who spearheaded the aquatics center project, told the Spotlight in an interview. 

Indeed, Moceri and others fundraised for the pool by promoting community outreach as a student-driven initiative. 

Shepard Broad Foundation president Deborah Bussel, a school alumna and former board member, said a key condition for donating was student participation in the community-access component. “I wanted the school to say ‘we are bought into this [student volunteerism] program’.” 

But that vision of a student-centered outreach program for community access to its pool ended years ago, current parents and school staff say. 

As long ago as 2016 a student-produced video questioned the school’s commitment to the community-access pledge and encouraged school leaders to “refocus on the original mission of the aquatics center” to justify its hefty expense.

Critics also take the school to task for breaking yet another pledge made in 2018 — for community use at a different pool at a recently acquired adjacent property – as a condition for City of Miami approval of an unrelated zoning application. 

Shortly after the city granted approval, school leaders filled in the pool to make way for a patio to host social events. 

The 2018 pledge, in the form of a Community Benefits Statement, was discussed by city commissioners prior to its vote on the zoning matter, records show. But the statement, which Miami District 2 Commissioner Ken Russell helped negotiate, was nonbinding, allowing the school to renege on its offer. 

Ewing has not forgotten. Throughout the drawn out Virrick Park pool reconstruction saga, she says, she’s reminded both school and city officials of the pledge to facilitate community access to Ransom Everglades’ pool. 

Those conversations proved “complicated and convoluted” and produced little. The Virrick pool, which closed in 2019, is scheduled to reopen late this year.

Kimberly Davis, whose Coconut Grove Optimist Club arranged, with the help of Frankel, to send the half-dozen students to the school earlier this year for free, twice-weekly swim lessons is worried that hundreds if not thousands of Coconut Grove children may have missed out on the opportunity of learning a life-saving skill at a pool built and funded for that purpose. 

“Some do not even know that a pool exists in the community,” Davis said.

Meanwhile, Ransom Everglades’ community pool is getting plenty of use. While students at the school — where annual tuition will cost $54,820 this year – generally use the larger Olympic pool for afterschool sports, Ransom Everglades utilizes its community pool year-round for its fee-based recreational and competitive swimming programs for outside students as young as five. Prices range from $105 to $280 per month for eight hours of pool time.

But not every child can attend, even if they can afford to pay the fee. Basic swimming skills are required.