It was another scorching day in July, and Irving’s YMCA team was once again out at an apartment pool, teaching kids how to not drown.
As it turned out, they would have to do more than teach that afternoon.
The YMCA spends the summer going from complex to complex across North Texas with its “Make a Splash” lessons. It seeks out low-income and minority communities where many kids can’t swim, stay home alone and are more likely to die in the water.
Free to residents, the program is too short for proper swimming lessons. The goal is simply to show kids how to escape the pool.
The Archstone apartments in north Irving are a bit more upscale than many that the Y visits, though the kids on the deck that afternoon weren’t much different.
A lifeguard peered across the shallow pool as instructors coaxed the kids in. Some hesitated, still scared of the water.
Unseen, in a deeper pool on the other side of the deck, a 7-year-old girl was sinking to the bottom.
Water kills more toddlers than anything but birth defects. And drowning remains a top cause of accidental death into and past adolescence.
The federal government urges survival lessons for minority children, who often inherit a fear of water from their parents. Its most recent study found black children almost six times as likely as whites to drown in a pool. Lakes, rivers and oceans claim blacks and Hispanics at higher rates.
The YMCA of Metropolitan Dallas started offering “urban swim” lessons several years ago but found that many children who needed them most couldn’t make it to their centers.
So the Y took the lessons to the kids.
Make a Splash started four years ago, at a handful of apartments in Vickery Meadow. The program exploded. Last year, it reached more than 120 complexes and 3,500 children in cities across North Texas, including Irving.
The girl at the bottom of Archstone’s pool had just finished one of her first lessons minutes before she fell in.
She was grouped with the younger kids in the shallow pool — toddlers and up who greet the water with flotation ropes around their stomachs.
After half an hour of splashing, a whistle blew. The girl climbed out of the pool with the others to give the older kids a turn.
No one is sure how the girl’s mother lost track of her. Or how she ended up at the pool across the deck — more than 4 feet deep and outside the lifeguard’s focus.
No one is sure how long she spent beneath the water.
“When the child falls in, they see the wall on the other side and panic,” said Doug Fox, Irving’s YMCA director. “They try to make it across.”
Make a Splash teaches children simply to float, turn around and look for a closer wall. Safety could be right behind them.
Some kids advance much further after four weeks of lessons — to a beginner’s breast stroke, perhaps.
“But they’re not swim lessons,” Fox said. “They’re how-not-to-drown lessons.”
And they work. When Irving started offering the program last year, Fox said, fewer than a quarter who signed up could escape the pool. After the lessons, 90 percent could.
The girl at the Archstone had no time to learn.
Drownings can be deceptively quiet. No splashing or screaming or waving arms.
Just a few feet from where the girl lay beneath the water, a woman was standing in the same pool with her toddler. She noticed nothing until she heard someone yell from the deck:
“Is that a baby in the pool?”
The woman looked down and saw a parent’s nightmare. Still holding her own child above the water, she tried to pull the little girl up with her foot.
The woman thought the girl reacted to her touch. In fact, she had already lost consciousness.
In some of the poorer areas that the YMCA visits, most parents can’t swim any better than their children.
“Grandma was afraid of the water. Mom was afraid of the water. The child doesn’t know anything but to be afraid of the water,” Fox said. “That’s why we’re teaching them.”
The YMCA asks apartment managers to pay up to $1,500 for the program — about a dozen hours with professional instructors and life guards. It relies on donations for the rest.
The Archstone’s managers signed up for Make a Splash for the first time this year.
They were just in time.
The lifeguard raced across the pool deck in what seemed like a single stride. He leapt into the water and pulled out the girl.
The YMCA had trained T.J. Wright to save lives, but the 19-year-old had never been put to the test before.
He pumped the girl’s chest and breathed into her mouth. No response. He did it again.
The girl vomited water across Wright’s chest but still did not wake up.
Again and again.
Falling back on their own training, the instructors cleared the kids from the main pool. One phoned 911. Another consoled the girl’s mother while other parents watched in horror.
More than 1,000 children drown each year in the United States.
The 7-year-old girl at the bottom of the Archstone’s pool was not one of them.
By the time sirens reached the complex, Wright had saved her life.
“It was definitely a life-changing experience,” Fox said.
For the director, it was also a message. He’s already making plans to expand Irving’s program to more complexes next summer.
“We’re going to try to get as many of these kids as we can,” Fox said. “We’ve had one example now of why it’s really important we’re out there.”
The City Council honored Wright and the rest of his team at a ceremony last week. The next day, the kids at the Archstone took their final lesson.
It was another scorching day, and the kids laughed and dog-paddled through water that had terrified some a few weeks earlier.
But the girl was not among them.
Though she had recovered quickly — bouncing on her hospital bed a day after Wright pulled her from the water — she never returned to the pool.
The YMCA has offered her private lessons. In time, Fox hopes she’s ready for them.
“We want to make sure this little girl isn’t afraid of the water for the rest of her life,” he said.
Or that, many years from now, her own children aren’t.