How many children in the United States have to drown before the other 49 states follow Louisiana’s lead?
Five children have drowned in America in the past week alone. The latest was on Wednesday when 3-year-old twins wandered from their home and into a pond in Cordele, Georgia. Charlie and Jax Smith did not come home.
Louisiana holds the answer to this crisis — mandatory classroom-based water safety education, requiring no pool and no special facilities, is the one approach that guarantees every child directly gets the information.
But making the argument isn’t enough. Louisiana now must prove it with hard data.
What’s clear is something isn’t working in this country when it comes to water safety. The push for swim lessons is important and the evidence backs it up. Children who take swim lessons are 88% less likely to drown.
But lessons miss a hard reality many lawmakers are reluctant to acknowledge: that some children will never set foot in a pool. The barriers are too high — cost, transportation, pool access and a fear of water passed down through families who were kept out of public pools for generations.
Today, 64% of Black children and 45% of Hispanic children have little or no swimming ability, according to the USA Swimming Foundation and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
Across the country, states have responded to the drowning crisis in different ways: some — like my home state of New York — have decided to send home packets with water safety resources for parents. Other states, like Florida, subsidize lessons through voucher programs.
All of these programs have one thing in common: good intentions but no guarantee that water safety information makes it to the child.
Louisiana chose a different approach entirely. And it may be transformative.
The Riley Bourgeois Act has its origins in a tragedy. In 2018, a little boy named Riley Bourgeois slipped away from his family’s watch and found his way to a neighbor’s swimming pool in Mathews. He was almost 2 years old. CPR was administered until first responders arrived. He was airlifted to Children’s Hospital in New Orleans. He fought for two days in the PICU before passing away.
His parents, Nicole and Darby Bourgeois, took that grief and turned it into a law, requiring water safety instruction in every Louisiana K-12 public school. Every student. Every grade. No exceptions. It passed in 2022.
And in the three years since, not one other state has acted.
I have seen firsthand how effective classroom discussions can be. As a teen water safety advocate, I have gone into preschool and elementary classrooms and talked about water safety. For some of these kids, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard rules about pools, lakes, or even bathtub safety.
The questions they ask stay with me.
“What if my parents say they’re watching me but they’re actually on their phones?”
