Beyond Swim Lessons: Building Lifelong Water Safety

What does it really mean for a child to be safe around water?

Chris Harkness, President of SafeSplash Swim School, talks about why learning to swim is only part of the answer. He explains the Safer Swimmer Promise, the self-rescue skills children should develop, and why becoming a capable swimmer takes time, repetition, and consistent practice. For many children, that process can take eight to twelve months rather than a few weeks of lessons.

The conversation looks at how we define water competency and whether children are learning skills they can actually use if they unexpectedly find themselves in trouble. Harkness discusses the importance of teaching children how to respond independently in the water while recognizing that no level of swimming ability makes a child drown-proof.

Swim lessons are also only one layer of protection. Active adult supervision, barriers around pools, CPR, emergency planning, and knowing how to respond when something goes wrong all play a role in preventing drowning and improving outcomes.

A key part of the discussion focuses on what happens when swimmers leave the pool. Oceans, lakes, and rivers introduce waves, currents, changing depths, cold water, and other conditions that cannot be fully recreated in a controlled swimming environment. Harkness discusses this gap and the possibility of bringing more open-water preparation into SafeSplash programming.

The interview also explores access. Scholarships, community partnerships, and other approaches can help make swimming instruction available to more families. But learning the skills is only the beginning. How well do children retain those skills months or years later, and how often do they need to practice to remain competent?

The bigger question is not simply whether a child can swim. It is how we build a system that gives children the skills, judgment, experience, and layers of protection they need to be safer around water throughout their lives.

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Beyond the Plan: Turning Water Safety Into Action

Drowning prevention does not begin with a swimming pool. It begins with knowledge, local leadership, and the willingness to use the resources a community already has.

Nathalie Martin discusses how her work in aquatics, research, humanitarian settings, and drowning prevention led to the creation of the Swim Global Project, a network designed to connect people across a water safety field that can often be fragmented. By bringing together swim school owners, researchers, public health professionals, operators, and other practitioners, Swim Global helps share knowledge, strengthen collaboration, and identify practical approaches to prevention.

Drawing on work in Bimini and Venezuela, Martin explains why effective water safety efforts must be built with communities rather than simply brought into them. In Bimini and other Caribbean communities, fear of the water, generational trauma, and long standing misinformation can influence swimming ability and attitudes toward the ocean. Sustainable change depends on community trust, local leadership, and building the capacity of people who will remain after outside experts leave.

Martin also emphasizes that water safety education does not have to wait for access to a pool. Important lessons about hazards, supervision, rescue, decision making, and safe behavior can begin on land. Practical prevention means starting with what a community already has, using evidence and expertise where needed, and avoiding the assumption that every solution must be built from scratch.

The conversation ultimately moves beyond creating water safety plans to the harder question of implementation. Plans are important, but their value comes from whether they lead to education, stronger local capacity, measurable action, and prevention in the real world.

“Water safety plans should not simply sit on a shelf; they should become a pathway for action.”

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August 16, 2026

Before the Rescue: Can Hawaiʻi Become the World’s Model for Water Safety?

Chief Kurt Lager on the Future of Ocean Safety in Hawaiʻi

What if the future of ocean safety begins before anyone needs rescuing?

Honolulu Ocean Safety is entering a new era. Now operating as an independent department, it has a greater ability to shape its staffing, equipment, facilities, budget and future direction. In this episode of Deep Dive Into Water Safety, Chief Kurt Lager explains how that change could help Hawaiʻi move beyond responding to emergencies and reach people before an emergency happens.

Better data is central to that vision. Through Watchtower, lifeguards can document not only rescues, but also the preventive actions they take every day. Those numbers can reveal patterns, guide resources and show a different measure of success: how many emergencies never happen because a lifeguard stepped in early.

The conversation also confronts one of Hawaiʻi’s most urgent challenges: protecting visitors, particularly from snorkeling related fatalities. Lager discusses working with the Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority, airlines and other partners to deliver meaningful water safety information during booking, before arrival and throughout a visitor’s stay, rather than waiting until someone reaches the beach.

But lifeguards cannot do this alone. Lager calls for stronger collaboration among counties, educators, government and community partners such as Nā Kama Kai and the Hawaiʻi Water Safety Coalition. The episode also explores why meaningful water safety education must return to Hawaiʻi’s schools so children grow up recognizing hazards, making safer decisions and developing water competency.

The timing is especially meaningful. Lifeguard Appreciation Week runs August 17 through 23, 2026, while Duke Kahanamoku OceanFest takes place August 14 through 24, 2026. Together, they offer a powerful moment to recognize lifeguards, celebrate Hawaiʻi’s ocean culture and ask how that culture can become part of a stronger statewide system of prevention.

The episode builds toward a larger question: Can Hawaiʻi become the model for water safety that the rest of the world follows? For Lager, that is exactly the opportunity ahead.

“We should be a leader in water safety in the world. We should be the model that everyone else follows.”

Chief Kurt Lager

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