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La Grange, IL —
The gray skies and whipping wind promised rain that threatened to dampen everything at Haigh Quarry in Kankakee on Thursday morning.
Everything, that is, except the spirits of the 43 Lyons Township High School students who woke up at about 7 a.m. and slogged through freezing water to earn their Professional Association of Dive Instructors certification.
The certification dives were the culmination of LT’s SCUBA Diving class, offered only to juniors and seniors, and roughly 90 students elected to take the program one step further last week by climbing into their black wetsuits, hoisting a 10-pound tank of air on their backs and swimming into the cold quarry over two days.
The extra step these students elected to take costs a little more than $200 and some of their free summer time.
“Who wants to take gym class when you could do this?” LT graduate Frank Nosek asked as he strapped his air tank on his back. “It’s awesome.”
Calls of “amen” and “that’s right” follow Nosek’s statement as the rest of his classmates finished gearing up and began following their teacher, Susie Murphy, to the quarry.
Murphy is the self-described “crazy lady” who brought scuba-diving classes to LT. A physical education teacher who worked as an aquatics director with the former Rich Port YMCA, Murphy said it was her “dream to make this happen at Lyons Township.”
After proposing the program and being rejected, the school board spent more time thinking about the idea and asked Murphy to propose it again, nine months later. She did and the board voted for its approval — despite the $15,000 to $20,000 in start-up costs.
The class is paid for through the general fund, with no fees attached to students.
At the time, Murphy was pregnant with her first child and still hadn’t taken the necessary number of dives to be the instructor of the course she just got the green light for.
“The minute my child was 6 months old, I was at the quarry on maternity leave diving and diving ‘cause you need so many hours,” Murphy said.
The class, recently completing its third year, is one of LT’s most popular. When Murphy started the program, they had hoped to have enough children to fill two classes per school year.
What they instead received was enough kids to fill 10 to 14 classes per year, with about 26 students to a class. Each class is one semester long, lasting about four months.
The gray skies and whipping wind promised rain that threatened to dampen everything at Haigh Quarry in Kankakee on Thursday morning.
Everything, that is, except the spirits of the 43 Lyons Township High School students who woke up at about 7 a.m. and slogged through freezing water to earn their Professional Association of Dive Instructors certification.
The certification dives were the culmination of LT’s SCUBA Diving class, offered only to juniors and seniors, and roughly 90 students elected to take the program one step further last week by climbing into their black wetsuits, hoisting a 10-pound tank of air on their backs and swimming into the cold quarry over two days.
The extra step these students elected to take costs a little more than $200 and some of their free summer time.
“Who wants to take gym class when you could do this?” LT graduate Frank Nosek asked as he strapped his air tank on his back. “It’s awesome.”
Calls of “amen” and “that’s right” follow Nosek’s statement as the rest of his classmates finished gearing up and began following their teacher, Susie Murphy, to the quarry.
Murphy is the self-described “crazy lady” who brought scuba-diving classes to LT. A physical education teacher who worked as an aquatics director with the former Rich Port YMCA, Murphy said it was her “dream to make this happen at Lyons Township.”
After proposing the program and being rejected, the school board spent more time thinking about the idea and asked Murphy to propose it again, nine months later. She did and the board voted for its approval — despite the $15,000 to $20,000 in start-up costs.
The class is paid for through the general fund, with no fees attached to students.
At the time, Murphy was pregnant with her first child and still hadn’t taken the necessary number of dives to be the instructor of the course she just got the green light for.
“The minute my child was 6 months old, I was at the quarry on maternity leave diving and diving ‘cause you need so many hours,” Murphy said.
The class, recently completing its third year, is one of LT’s most popular. When Murphy started the program, they had hoped to have enough children to fill two classes per school year.
What they instead received was enough kids to fill 10 to 14 classes per year, with about 26 students to a class. Each class is one semester long, lasting about four months.
“To get that kind of response, it exceeded all our expectations,” Murphy said.
The class is split between lectures with a textbook and pool time, where 26 juniors and seniors climb into a pool to learn the necessary skills, including underwater sign language, to eventually become certified.
“In the classroom, they are learning the science behind this,” Murphy said. “This is truly what it is, a science.”
It’s also an extremely physical activity.
Besides the obvious exercise of swimming, students often are carrying an additional 30 pounds of gear before they get into the water. But it was extra weight that none of the few dozen students on Thursday morning seemed to mind carrying.
“And tell me that’s not fitness,” Murphy added.
The mix of fitness and science suited recent LT graduate Brian Noonan well.
“I want to become a biologist,” the La Grange resident said. “Scuba made sense.”
For Joel Swanson, another recent LT graduate, the scuba program presented him with an opportunity to join his friends in a hobby they share.
“I want to travel and a bunch of my buddies are certified,” Swanson explained.
Those responses were exactly what Murphy said she was looking for when she first proposed the class.
“We want to get people, whether it’s a kid or an adult, interested in lifelong activities,” Murphy said. “It’s about getting people involved in a physical activity that they can do for the rest of their lives and they can enjoy.”
On Thursday, the enthusiasm was clear. After a 20-minute dive, eight heads emerged from the murky water of the quarry. As soon as each could let out a breath of fresh air, they started cheering.
Many were now certified divers.
