Swimming quickly through the shallow end of the pool at the Village East Swim Club in Manhattan, Jacob De La Rosa, 10, surfaced behind his instructor and clutched the noodles of the pool around his waist, moving back and forth. waving and smiling.
The scene would have been impossible a year ago. Jacob, who has autism, was terrified of getting into the water, said his mother, Lee Hodge, 36. But that changed last summer when he was selected to participate in a free beginner swimming lesson through Friends of + POOL, a non-profit group.
“In the first week he started the program, he was a real fish,” she said.
Ms. Hodge said that as a single parent, paying for swimming lessons — which can cost as much as $50 for a group lesson and over $100 for private sessions — would have been out of the question, a situation for many New York City families.
But as summer sets in, swimming lessons — free or not — have become scarce due to a shortage of national lifeguards in the city and across the country. Swimming pools have had to close or reduce their hours because they don’t have enough lifeguards, who also often serve as instructors.
New York City’s public swimming pools will open for the season on Tuesday, but the city has had to cancel its free swimming lesson program. Meanwhile, private programs have long waiting lists, some in the hundreds, for increasingly expensive classes.
Before the pandemic, the city made strides in increasing the accessibility of swimming lessons to lower-income communities and bridging historically rooted racial inequalities. Now, experts and swim program leaders are concerned that the lack of access to water safety instructions and affordable swimming lessons means many children and parents will not learn potentially life-saving skills.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more children between the ages of 1 and 4 die from drowning than any other cause of death except birth defects.
The lack of swimming lessons can also negatively impact progress in improving swimming ability in young people. As more young people are learning to swim, racial disparities still persist, according to a 2017 USA Swimming Foundation survey: More than two-thirds of black children have low or no swimming ability, the study found.
“It makes me sick,” said Carol Irwin, a researcher at the University of Memphis and lead author of the USA Swimming study, of the moratorium on classes in New York City. “Some of those kids will drown.”
The city’s Department of Parks and Recreation’s decision to cancel the free “Learn to Swim” program, which served 20,506 children and 670 adults in 2019, is arguably the biggest blow to New York’s swim education this season.
Janiyah Walton, 8, who lives in Manhattan with her mother, Shika Barton, 39, started learning to swim before the pandemic through free swimming lessons in the city. Ms. Barton hoped to put Janiyah’s name in the raffle again for classes this summer, but no email came from the city announcing the start of enrollment.
“It’s sad because she’s going to be behind and I really want her to learn how to swim,” said Ms. Barton, adding, “Who pays $700 to $800 for swimming lessons — for about five lessons?”
Crystal Howard, assistant commissioner of the parks department, said a smaller corps of lifeguards made it impossible to offer the free classes that require lifeguards.
“Safety is our top priority,” said Ms. Howard. “That’s why we prioritize access to the millions who visit our pools annually rather than diverting resources to support programming.”
The state has also offered free and paid swimming lessons in a dozen state parks in recent years, including in New York City locations. Now classes are only offered at Riverbank State Park in Manhattan, which serves about 300 children annually, unless the state can hire more lifeguards this summer.
The scarcity of classes in the city has led to a great deal of interest in a relatively small number of slots.
When Friends of + POOL opened registrations for free classes last week, there were more than 1,000 interested families for 150 slots, said Kara Meyer, director of Friends of + POOL.
Interest in SwimJim Swimming Lessons, a private fee-paying program with locations in Upper Manhattan, Brooklyn and Texas, is up 25 percent, said Jim Spiers, its chief executive and president.
The growth would be great, he said, if the constant attrition of instructors and lifeguards didn’t leave the company struggling with staffing classes.
Imagine Swimming, another private, fee-based program in Brooklyn and Manhattan, cut class times by 10 minutes to offset the rise in operating costs, including pool facility rentals.
“If you can’t get more pools and you can’t get more staff to meet the demand, we can only meet that demand by reducing the length of classes,” said Brendan O’Melveny, Imagine Chief Aquatic Officer. Swimming. †
Swim program officials and directors agree on the one major hurdle to hiring more lifeguards: pay.
The city aims to hire between 1,400 and 1,500 lifeguards a year, but was only able to hire just over 1,000 lifeguards by 2021. About 500 were hired this year.
Recertification of former lifeguards is underway until July 4, but many found employment earlier in the pandemic, when swimming pools were shut down for months and the recertification process takes a long time, officials said.
Some municipalities and private programs raised wages or offered new benefits to attract recruits, but the city has failed to do so. The starting salary for lifeguards is $16 per hour as of 2019.
Henry Garrido, executive director of District Council 37, the union that negotiates the city’s lifeguards, said his union had interviewed former lifeguards who decided not to apply this year, and that “80 percent of the problem was wages.”
Negotiations between the city and the union to raise the starting wage for lifeguards to $20 this season have failed. A spokesman for the city said the board had no comment on the talks with the union.
Last week, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced an immediate increase to 34 percent in the starting salary for state guards. The YMCA, which starts lifeguards at $18 an hour, now offers its in-house certification courses, which elsewhere can cost up to $450, free to anyone who signs up and meets the screening requirements.
Other private organizations are increasing salaries, covering the cost of certifications and relying on qualified volunteer networks to stay competitive.
Another issue, according to Mr Spiers of SwimJim: “People just don’t see it as glamorous as it used to be. It’s not like Baywatch anymore.”
For his smaller organization, finding pool facilities was a hurdle.
In the city, some public high school campuses have swimming pools, but many have fallen into disuse in the past two decades.
The school system’s 27 operational pools are organizing swimming and water safety training for students, a spokeswoman for the education ministry said. Nearly 40 public school students have been certified as lifeguards this year, but the department doesn’t track how many students take swimming lessons through school programs.
Paulana Lamonier, founder of Black People Will Swim, a Long Island nonprofit program, said the pool facilities she hoped to rent this summer were largely closed for renovations. Instead, she will contract with private houses to teach her classes.
Before the pandemic, Imagine Swimming had two facilities of its own and about 14 satellite facilities that it leased from colleges, high schools, residential buildings and hotels.
This year, Mr O’Melveny said, the group has been able to rent a third of its satellite facilities, at an increased rate of about 30 percent.
“It’s alarming to know that so many New York City kids are unlikely to have the opportunity to take swimming lessons this summer because of the shortage of lifeguards,” said Mr. O’Melveny.