Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Get off the high dive!
One more thrill, or terror if you were like me, enjoyed by kids in our day is passing to a bygone era.
Lawyers are making community pools say goodbye to the high dive.
Here’s an excerpt from from a column in the Wall Street Journal by Steve Moore:
I’m now an official victim of the trial lawyers. So are my kids and the 800 members of our community pool that opened this summer without a high diving board.
The three-meter board had been a fixture of our pool at Chesterbrook Swim Club in Fairfax County, Va., for as long as anyone can remember. But the county has declared that it can no longer afford to pay the liability insurance for it — and so we’ve been grounded.
Most of the parents and kids share my disappointment at being cheated out of one of the great joys of summertimes past. No high board means no more “atomic” cannonballs, can openers, jack knives and watermelons, the kind of attention-grabbing dives that boys love to perform, sending a quarter of the pool’s water spraying onto unsuspecting sunbathers nearby. And no more graceful teenage girls either, performing double flips with a twist, entering the water with hardly a ripple.
So why can’t we just have a sign that reads: “Jump off this board at your own risk”? Some of our club members, many of whom are lawyers, say the elimination of the high board is for the safety of “the children.”
Moore says there are lots of drownings and injuries in swimming pools across the country each year, but few of them actually involve diving boards.
Which brings us back to the trial lawyers. Diving accidents may be rare, but when they occur, lawyers become relentless in their quest for a jackpot jury verdict. In one famous 1993 case, a 14-year-old boy in Washington state took a “suicide dive” — headfirst with no arms out for protection — off the board of a neighbor’s pool. He was tragically paralyzed from the neck down when he hit his head on the bottom of the pool. Despite the boy’s own unsafe behavior, the parents’ legal team sued every imaginable party—the neighbors, the pool-construction company, the diving-board manufacturer, the pool industry—and the family won a $10 million jury award.
Ever since, it’s been off to the races. Even cases in which there is no negligence on anyone’s part can lead to jury awards of $5 million or more.
Two of my daughters count jumping off the high dive last summer among their greatest acomplishments. And when we joined the pool, having a high dive was one of the pool manager’s big selling points since so few still do.
What can be done to save the high dive?
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