Looking for a Philly pool’s schedule? Check the pool, not online.

Quick: What are the hours for your local public pool?

If you aren’t already a regular visitor who has the schedule down, your first step might be to look up the schedule on the City of Philadelphia and Parks and Recreation’s website. But perhaps surprisingly, that would bring you to a digital dead end.

While Parks and Recreation’s page for the pool schedules says that “all open pools offer public swim from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. daily”, that’s as much specificity as one can find. Even on the department’s useful pool finder map, there’s no additional information about hours for any particular pool.

But the pools can generally be open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. during the week and noon to 5 p.m. on weekends, with programming broken down by the hour, leaving some people unsure when to plan their visit.

A reader recently asked why the full public pool schedules aren’t published anywhere online through Curious Philly, The Inquirer’s forum for answering reader questions.

Kassie Andreadis moved to Graduate Hospital last year from West Philly, where she didn’t have a public pool close by. She was excited to use the pools this summer to escape from the thick, oppressive heat, so when Philly experienced its 100-degree heat in June, Andreadis planned an after-work visit to Ridgway Pool.

She couldn’t make it during the 1 p.m. -4 p.m. “public swim” hours posted online, but found a picture on Yelp of a sign outside the pool that indicated it was open until 7.

But when Andreadis arrived, she found out the pool was being used for other programming at the time, and she couldn’t swim. She returned home.

“Shouldn’t that be listed somewhere?” she said. When she told a coworker about what happened, they expressed the same frustration.

“You just kind of have to know how it works,” Andreadis recalled her coworker saying.

Your best move is to visit the pool in person, where most tend to have a schedule written on a whiteboard or a sheet of paper that you can take a picture of.

“Every facility tailors their activity based on the community,” said Brian Mango, assistant recreation leader at Lee Cultural Center Pool in West Powelton. There, public swim hours go an hour longer than what is listed online. On Fridays, they host Aqua Zumba class from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Mango said most people from the community already have a feel for the schedule. That’s essential at Lee, since you have to go past the entrance where one programming schedule is posted to find the whiteboard where the more updated schedule is.

“You may get some people that have never been here, you gotta explain to them,” he said.

“Most people who come here are from the neighborhood and they’re understanding,” said Zyrae Allen-Williams, a pool maintenance assistant at O’Connor Pool near Fitler Square, about its schedule. She said that they’re used to turning people away like Andreadis who come at the wrong hours.

Most pools operate with a schedule that goes something like this, according to Parks and Recreation spokesperson Ra’Chelle Rogers:

It’s unclear. Rogers declined to comment on the question, and the pool employees at Lee, O’Connor, and others said they did not know the answer either.

Some pools do post their schedules on individual social media pages, but many do not.

One possible explanation may be inconsistent staffing. There has been a nationwide lifeguard shortage over the past several years, and the Parks and Recreation website states “pool schedules and hours vary based on available staffing.”

If the full schedule isn’t posted online, there’d be no need to update a website while staffing is in flux.

Or, it could just be another Philly case of — that’s just the way it’s always been done.