Water Safety Week: Black children more likely to drown due to inequities in learning to swim
NEW YORK -- Every summer, children drown at local pools, beaches and rivers.
That's why CBS2 is dedicating this week to water safety. We begin our weeklong series with the troubling history around teaching kids to swim.
"To lose a child is one of the hardest things ever," mother Samantha Singh told CBS2's Jennifer Bisram.
Daniel Persaud was just 13 years old when he drowned last June in the Jamaica Bay in Queens. He was with his best friend, Ryan Wong, who also died.
"Maybe he would have swam away from the current in the water and he would have been with us today," Singh said.
Last month, 11-year-old Alfa Barrie and 13-year-old Garrett Warren drowned in the Harlem River. They, too, didn't know how to swim.
"Systemic racism, segregation that happened, Jim Crow laws around pools made it so the adults don't know how to swim, and we've found that if adults don't know how to swim, their kids often don't know how to swim," said Alex Hoehn-Saric, chair of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Studies show drownings disproportionately affect communities of color. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 5 to 19-year-olds who were Black were five times more likely to drown in a swimming pool compared to their white peers, and Black children ages 11 and 12 were 10 times more likely to drown.
The USA Swimming Foundation found 64% of African American children and 45% of Hispanic children have little to no ability to swim, even though swim lessons can reduce the risk of drowning by 88%.
"If you are making less money, you're farther away, it's harder to get to a pool, then and it's less likely that you'll be able to teach your kids how to swim," Hoehn-Saric said.
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Grieving mothers say the answer is simple.
"I think swimming should be part of the curriculum in schools," said Singh.
While New York City public schools do not offer swim classes to students, they do partner with organizations that teach swimming and provide water safety training.
The Sophie Gerson Healthy Youth organization provides middle school students with free swimming classes for eight months, in addition to summer camp.
"Our organization partners with New York City public schools, serving very low income communities. And we identify, vet and fully fund the cost," Alan J. Gerson said.
This year, more than 100 public middle school students from the South Bronx and Manhattan's Lower East Side took part in the program and learned to float, swim and even dive at the Seahorse Swim Club.
But learning to swim is only part of water safety and survival.
"Whether it's your local swimming pool, which is the least volatile water, to a little pond in your backyard, a little stream in your local park, a big lake, our rivers here, or the ocean, being the most volatile of the waters -- all of those have a different nature, behavior and danger," said Swim Strong Foundation founder Shawn Slevin.
The Swim Strong Foundation has gone into more than 40 public schools in Brooklyn and Queens so far this year and taught nearly 20,000 students situational swimming with their know-before-you-go access and education program.
"Even a very strong skilled swimmer would have difficulty navigating these waters," Slevin said. "Two minutes and two inches is all it takes for any of us to drown."
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Drownings continue to be the leading cause of death among young children, especially in pools. From 2018 to 2020, more than 1,100 kids 15 years and younger died from reported drownings.
New York City says it is working to create more free programs to reduce unintentional drowning incidents, especially in Black and brown communities.
Advocates say schools should have a universal swim program. But with only 32 pools across 1,859 school buildings and 1.1 million students to teach, preventing water tragedies will be hard.
"I lost something really, really great," said Singh.
We'll be looking into water safety all week, continuing tomorrow with more on what parents should know about keeping kids safe around the pool.
