Wu launches swimming initiative, marks pool reopening
Dressed in her swimsuit, Mayor Michelle Wu on Thursday launched the city’s Swim Safe Boston initiative, which aims to make swimming and water safety resources more accessible. The announcement came during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the reopening of the Boston Center for Youth and Families Paris Street pool in East Boston following a three-year, $10.2 million renovation.
After cutting the ribbon, Wu jumped into the pool alongside several project administrators and teenage lifeguards as whoops and cheers echoed throughout the space.
As part of the city’s Connect, Learn, Explore: Commitment to Youth initiative, Swim Safe Boston is a “commitment to investing in water safety by closing racial gaps in access and ability,” Wu said.
The program aims to lower drowning rates and increase access to safe public swimming, particularly among communities of color, Wu said. It is slated to receive $500,000 of funding from the city’s budget.
“Whether people feel safe in the water is often an issue of racial inequity,” Wu said. “For a long time, swim lessons have been inaccessible to families and communities of color because of cost or because public pools didn’t exist in their neighborhood.”
She said that a quarter of Black parents and a third of Latino parents in the United States have never learned to swim, compared to just one in 25 white parents who did not learn to swim. This disparity is passed down through generations: Today, less than half of Black and Latino children receive swimming lessons compared to 75 percent of white children, Wu said.
The Swim Safe initiative aims to address this gap through increased access to pools, swimming lessons, and jobs as lifeguards. The program will offer up to 500 free swim lessons via partnerships with local YMCAs and Boys and Girls Clubs, Wu said, and Boston Children’s Hospital will provide 1,000 life jackets to parents of young children visiting Boston beaches.
Swim Safe will also recruit and train lifeguards for free, offering a $22-per-hour starting wage and signing and retention bonuses.
Wu acknowledged the fear many people feel around water, especially among parents of children who cannot swim, adding that swim lessons reduce drowning by 90 percent. She encouraged parents to take advantage of new opportunities for them and their children to learn the skill.
“I’m the mom of two young boys and just recently, they learned how to swim after some classes at our local YMCA,” Wu said. “The relief that comes from feeling like you can be around water … it’s immeasurable.
“Today in Boston, we have an opportunity for every body of water to be safe,” Wu said. “Our young people in Boston are going to grow up knowing how to swim, having lessons and classes so the whole family can take advantage of what is not only a lifesaving skill, but something that is so important in a coastal city.”
In Boston, people of color made up 60 percent of drownings and near-fatalities in the first half of 2021, the Globe found. This echoes nationwide data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that the drowning death rate for Black people is 1.5 times higher than the drowning death rate for white people.
The disparity has been attributed to factors like racial stereotypes, segregation-era rules, and socioeconomic barriers that created a generations-long lack of access to swimming pools for Black communities.
Boston’s chief of human services, José Massó, who worked as a lifeguard and swim coach throughout his life, called on community members to spread awareness of free swim lessons and lifeguard training throughout East Boston.
“I want to acknowledge those who did not learn how to swim as children and now face fear and shame as adults,” he said. “Fear of the water can trickle down from generation to generation, and breaking the cycle is key to reducing the risk of drowning in our Black and brown communities.”
The current Swim Safe initiative follows the reopening of three public pools that were among the 12 shuttered due to renovations and staffing shortages between 2020 and 2022. It also comes after former Mayor Kim Janey’s Swim Safely partnership, which offered swimming lessons for children and adults at YMCAs in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Hyde Park.
Massachusetts state Representative Adrian Madaro said he was excited to see the new face of the Paris Street pool he swam in as a child. Laughing, he noted the stark difference between then and now.
“This is night and day, and that is both literal and figurative. When you came in here before, this was a dark, dingy pool. … Now, look at all this natural light,” he said. “This is the type of amenity our folks deserve.”
Swim Safe is part of the city’s summer safety strategy — a community-building framework focused on addressing violence by providing Boston youth with accessible summer activities.
The summer safety strategy includes the newly added Teen-Ventures program, which allows teenagers in Boston to access sites operated by the YMCA, Boys and Girls Club, or Boston Centers for Youth and Families free of charge.