On Monday, the Stop Youth Drowning: Safe Swim Berkshire Initiative will make its debut during spring break for Pittsfield’s students.
“So, our mission is to build confidence, essential water safety skills and knowledge – really, it’s confidence – in our youth, and we are targeting middle school students in the Berkshires," Linda Duyle told WAMC. "Not many of our young people in the Berkshires have had exposure to water, let alone to swimming, and so we really want to drive for water safety for all middle school students, we're starting, that's our focus right now.”
Duyle of Dulye & Co. works in leadership development and is one of the main sponsors of the program.
“We're starting with a pilot," she continued. "The goal would be to make this a curriculum where there is embedded in our curriculum in the schools a water safety program, and students emerge with these lifesaving skills to prevent drowning happening in our community.”
The effort to equip young Berkshire residents with swimming skills emerges from tragedy.
“There was a tragic drowning last summer of a young woman in our Berkshire community," sighed Dulye. "She was actually on a school outing. It was an incident that was just affecting our community at large- And imagine the youth that were part of that school outing, her teachers. She actually is part of a parish community. I'm a member of the African Catholic community at St. Marks, and she was part of our community there. I was affected to where I felt I need to do something, and I just can't be part of a community that sits in silence that we had the drowning of a young person. We have magnificent waters in the Berkshires. Our lakes are free. Everywhere, we have beautiful waterfronts and we have rivers, and having youth at risk for drowning is just not something that I personally felt comfortable with.”
The initiative is a collaboration between Dulye, the Berkshire Family YMCA, and the Gladys Allen Brigham Community Center with support from the Pittsfield Public Schools.
“Water safety and swimming isn't a privilege, it's a priority. It's a life skill. It's something that everyone should have in order to be safe," said Abigail Allard, Development and Communications Manager at the Gladys Allen Brigham Community Center, home of Girls Inc. of the Berkshires. “There really is this gap that happens after the age of like 12, where when you're 13, 14, 15 years old, and if you don't know how to swim, it's almost a detriment to their growth and development, because one, you hit those teenage years, and you're embarrassed more easily, people are more judgmental in your friends group, so you're not going to tell your friends you don't know how to swim, but you'll want to go to all the events that people are inviting you to. So, you're making risky choices in order to kind of socially meet the needs that you have.”
For its inaugural run, 21 young people will attend anti-drowning classes for five days over the course of the week.
“Our goal is to offer this program continuously for years to come, and to offer it at no cost to these families," Allard continued. "So that way, we are working with some of our teens that are from these under resourced or marginalized communities where maybe paying for a swim lesson or paying for aquatic access is outside of the realm of what they can do and their families can do.”
