Swim Crusader
Find out about longtime swimming instructor Johnny Johnson and how he has made drowning prevention his cause.
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Johnny Johnson isn’t a public health researcher. But if there is something that he knows in his gut after far too many years of reading about toddlers drowning, it is that swimming lessons can make a difference.
Summer – peak pool season – is when he gets on his figurative bullhorn, reinforcing the message to parents to do all they can to mitigate their children’s risk of drowning. It’s a mission that Johnson, who has become the county’s unofficial chief crusader on drowning prevention, didn’t plan on taking on early in his career as a swimming instructor at the renowned Blue Buoy Swim School in Tustin and later, as the school’s owner.
Drowning is the leading cause of unintentional injury-related deaths for children ages one to four in Orange County. Statistics like this nagged at Johnson for many years. He felt more needed to be done beyond efforts to educate the public about putting in place barriers around the pool, always having supervision and being prepared to perform rescue techniques – the traditional cornerstones of drowning prevention programs.
He believed there was a missing piece: teaching young kids swimming skills. He also believed that swimming lessons could be beneficial beginning at toddlerhood.
There was a major stumbling block as he tried to get public health and safety officials to listen. He had nothing but anecdotal evidence based on his school’s and others’ experiences with toddlers. Because there were no studies that showed a positive correlation between learning how to swim at a very young age and reducing the risk of drowning, the American Academy of Pediatrics had no recommendations for swimming lessons for children under age five.
“Yet, pediatricians, emergency physicians and other doctors have been sending their toddlers to our swimming classes for decades,” Johnson says. “They know their kids aren’t being subjected to something detrimental to development. The parents see the benefits of building a terrific foundation – their kids learn safety skills being in and around the water.”
Despite the absence of studies, several years ago, Johnson decided to take up the cause. He launched a nonprofit national organization called Swim For Life Foundation, which focuses primarily on drowning prevention efforts with its Safer 3 program: safer water (barriers), safer kids (supervision and swimming skills) and safer response (rescue techniques). He even enlisted the help of Olympians, including Jason Lezak, a former Blue Buoy student, in promoting the Safer 3 message in Corona del Mar last year. To be clear, Johnson says that there is no such thing as drown-proofing kids, and that parents of kids who know how to swim need to be vigilant.
After years of championing his cause, he has every reason to be optimistic, or even feel vindicated. In March 2009, Dr. Ruth Brenner, a respected researcher on childhood drowning, and her colleagues at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development published a significant study about children’s swimming lessons and drowning in the journal Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine. The study showed that one- to four-year-old kids who drowned were much less likely to have taken swimming lessons than same-age kids who attended swimming classes.
The study pretty much confirmed what Johnson has been saying. This time, Johnson has more than just his gut to rely on. He has the evidence to back what his experience and intuition told him.
For more information on Safer 3, go to swimforlife.org.
