Fairfax County Public Schools this week celebrated the launch of a new program to help young learners make safe choices in the water with an immersive “water safety festival” featuring visits from Olympic swimmers.
Students from grades 3-5 gathered at the Skyview High School swimming pool on Tuesday (Oct. 13) to try out the basics of swimming, paddle from inside an inflatable boat, and hear from two-time Olympic gold medalist Cullen Jones. Maritza Correia McClendon, an Olympic silver medalist, also visited earlier in the day.
“Water safety is critically important,” Superintendent Michelle Reid told FFXnow during the event. “We want to teach children how to be safe around the water because it’s such a preventable cause of death in the United States.”
Available to all FCPS students in grades 3-5, the new Water S.A.F.E. (Safe, Aquatic Future and Education) program is designed to reduce barriers to water safety education and expand access to opportunities in aquatics.
Swimmers in the program will learn how to properly fit a life jacket, hold their breath under water, recognize hazards, and develop emergency response skills.
Noting that “early days are important for teaching swim lessons,” Reid said the school division wanted “to make sure that every third grader had access to water safety instruction, because not all our children in Fairfax County have access to swim lessons, or swimming pools, or the ability to learn water safety.”
Jones, who won a U.S. team gold medal at the 2008 Olympics and both individual gold and silver medals in the 2012 games, drove home the importance of that lesson by telling students the story of his own near-drowning coming off the water slide at an amusement park when he was only 5 years old.
“I had to be resuscitated — CPR, coughing up water,” Jones said. “And thankfully, I woke up. I saw my dad. I saw my mom, and I saw the lifeguard.”
“It took me five different teachers before I started feeling comfortable around water,” Jones continued. “Now, why am I telling this? Because I believe in irony. Twenty years later, after some hard work, I came home with this.”
Jones held up one of his Olympic gold medals, which he was wearing, for all to see.
But swimming, Jones told the children, isn’t about the medals.
“Swimming is a life skill,” he said. “… I want every single person to understand the importance. It’s the second leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. next to car crashes, drownings.”
