Category: About FOSS

Many of our FOSS families have asked about air circulation at our pools, so we wanted to give a quick overview of a major point of pride that we don’t often get to talk about: the top-of-the-line air exchange system we install at every school. In 2021, the question is ...

Maybe you had an uncle who said the best way to teach kids to swim is to throw them off a raft into 10 feet of water. Or a neighbor who insisted children can learn all they need in water 24 inches deep. Like many aspects of learning to swim, ...

An occasional series about how Foss Swim School operates. Whether you are considering swimming with us for the first time or already a part of the “Foss Family,” you may wonder how we approach the enrollment process at Foss Swim School. If this describes you, here is our registration roadmap, ...

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Safety and health have always been at the core of what we do at Foss Swim School and how we do it. Helping people be safer around water is the foundation of our swim education, but safety also extends to the experience in our schools and doing all we can ...

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a challenging one for the entire FOSS family, including our students, their families, our employees, and our communities. But we know that we at Foss Swim School still have a lot to be grateful for, and we are making it our mission ...

By Susan Foss, co-founder of Foss Swim School In Part 1 of this post, I shared how Jon and I founded Foss Swim School on the belief that a school setting, designed for learning and regular progression, is the best way to teach a child to swim. In this installment, ...

By Susan Foss, co-founder of Foss Swim School When Jon and I founded Foss Swim School in 1993, we wanted to create a better way to learn to swim and enjoy its many benefits, including vastly improved water safety, intellectual and physical development for kids, and love of swimming and ...

By Foss Swim School  Read about our COVID Safety First Plan here  We’re so happy to welcome swimmers back to our pools! As we, like all of you, have navigated 2020 our first thoughts have been to wish a speedy and full recovery to any afflicted, and to do what we can to help reduce the spread of the coronavirus. ...

By Jon Foss It’s a question we hear from customers on a regular basis: Does FOSS use salt water generators as part of the water purification in its pools? The short answer is that we DO have salt water generators at some of our locations, but the answer our customers ...

The art and science of teaching has changed a lot in recent decades—and we’re not just talking about teaching swimming, but the fundamentals that go into education. American schools are moving away from the lecture-and-test approach, away from teaching subjects in isolation and away from rote memorization. At Foss Swim ...

Walk into a Foss Swim School and you will find a special kind of pool: A purpose-built teaching pool. Founder Jon Foss has personally overseen or developed many of the custom features of these pools, all of them purposeful to support Jon’s teaching philosophy in a way a standard public ...

We hear from families that what sets Foss Swim School apart, and the reason they keep coming back, is the people. We couldn’t agree more – hiring the right kinds of people and training them well is a huge part of what FOSS does. We hire people who love working ...

As a swim school, FOSS spends a lot of time training our teachers the right way to pass along and nurture the development of specific swim skills. We turn these skills into fun, age-appropriate activities and exercises that build on each other to help a child progress on their own, ...

Learning to swim—or learning any activity—sometimes gets put in a separate category by parents from the learning done in elementary school. Sometimes it’s called sports, or exercise, or physical activity, and teaching it is called “coaching” or “instruction.” In our experience, learning physical skills has a lot more in common ...