TEXAS – Swim lessons are back in session at Waterloo Swimming but the class sizes are significantly smaller. It’s not just because of social distancing efforts—fewer families are signing up. That’s concerning to one swim instructor who sees the connection between fewer kids in swim classes and more accidental drownings.
Waterloo Swimming reopened at the end of May with social distancing efforts put in place and swim instructors wearing masks or face shields while in the pool. But even though they’ve been open for months, Operation Director Sarah Wheeler said many families still haven’t returned.
“We did send out a couple of surveys after the pandemic lockdown to see why parents hadn’t returned to lessons,” said Wheeler. “We found that the biggest drivers were location and fear of coming in for exposure, as well as cost as people’s livelihoods had changed.”
The lockdown happened to coincide with a sharp rise in accidental drownings across the United States. Fort Worth’s Medstar reported a 120 percent year-over-year increase in drowning calls back in June.
“Thankfully since then, they’ve started to plateau again,” commented Wheeler. “But we really got concerned right when that happened and starting to see a trend that we didn’t want to continue.”
If virtual learning could work for school, Wheeler figured it could work with swim lessons as well, leading to the birth of Waterloo Wherever.
“There’s 21 videos. They’re geared toward parents of young children ages around 2-and-a-half to probably 6 or 7,” said Wheeler. “The videos feature myself and my son. I’m teaching my son to swim in the videos and then teaching parents how to teach their own children how to swim.”
The videos utilize the same curriculum as in-person classes at Waterloo’s swim school. All of the videos are available free of charge to avoid any financial obstacles caused by the pandemic.
According to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, 67 children have died in accidental drownings across Texas so far in 2020. There were 87 fatal drownings in 2019 and 91 in 2018.