A New Jersey nonprofit has come up with a pool safety guide to reduce drownings

A coalition of activists, educators, and service organizations unveiled a Swim Safety Plan in Camden on Tuesday, making New Jersey the third state to outline a statewide strategy to reduce drownings.

Speakers included leaders from the New Jersey Swim Safety Alliance, the Northeast Spa Association, and a pair of water safety nonprofits — the ZAC Foundation and the Victoria Ercol Memorial Foundation. They were joined in the Kroc Center’s atrial lobby by Salvation Army major Richard Sanchez and families who had lost loved ones in drowning incidents.

Together, the conference’s attendees outlined actions they say could reduce drownings across the state: increased awareness; drowning prevention; more training for lifeguards amid a national shortage; increased funding for education and safety equipment; and, finally, collaboration among governments, private companies, and service organizations.

“We’re doing God’s work,” said Judith Lebelin Josephs, a coauthor of the Swim Safety Plan and a board member of the New Jersey Swim Safety Alliance. “And we’re making it better to be a visitor and a guest in New Jersey.”

The World Health Organization first called on its member states to produce extensive strategies for water safety in a 2014 report.

At the time, America was in the midst of a decades-long dip in drowning deaths. But that declined ended in the years after COVID-19 arrived in the U.S.: 4,500 people died in drownings in the United States between 2020 and 2022, bringing the challenge of expanding water safety to national attention. New Jersey averages 64 drowning deaths per year, according to the alliance.

The United States, a WHO member until earlier this year, released a National Action Plan in 2023 to educate swimmers and expand access to safe aquatic facilities.

The Jersey plan “isn’t going to be put on a shelf,” said the alliance’s executive director, Linda Tower. Its authors and advocates plan to update the program as they get more information about which pieces are most effective, they said.

One of the speakers, Connie Ercol, lost her daughter, Victoria, at just 14 months old in a June 7, 1992, drowning the elder Ercol attributed to “several errors that took place that day.”

In the years after, the Ercols helped start and fund a pair of Christian schools in Ghana and Connie Ercol became an advocate for swimming safety and education through the Victoria Ercol Foundation.

In the course of her work with the foundation, Connie Ercol discovered that indigenous tribal communities and Black Americans drown at far higher rates than white swimmers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“That seemed very unfair to us,” Connie Ercol said of the drowning disparity. Much of the Victoria Ercol Foundation’s work is now directed toward connecting families in cities like Camden to affordable swim lessons and swimsuits.

Many of those barriers are neither new nor coincidental: Public pools in much of America were long segregated by race, most infamously in the Jim Crow South. But in the North and West, Black swimmers were often kept out of pools by geographic or financial barriers.

In the years after the federal government moved to integrate public spaces, cities often drained their public pools or filled them with concrete rather than allow Black and white swimmers to share space. During the era of “white flight,” many areas lavished resources on posh suburban pools while public accommodations in cities went neglected.

Another attendee at the event, Curlie Jackson, had encountered those headwinds firsthand. Her grandson, Naisere LaDonn Nelson, had learned how to swim in a neighbor’s pool. On June 9, 2011, Nelson was killed when a series of large tides carried him out to sea at the Jersey Shore.

Jackson began handing out bracelets to promote her grandson’s memory and water safety at his memorial. And she has worked with the Boys and Girls Clubs of New Jersey on a plan to make swim safety education more accessible.

There were barriers at first, Jackson said: stereotypes, disillusionment, disinterest.

“But I think that since that time, things have become more available to us,” she said, “and we’re learning more about water safety.”