When Caliph “C.J.” Newton was five years old, his family went on a trip to Disney World. They had booked an Airbnb with a pool, and while the rest of the family took a dip, Newton, who is missing part of his right leg due to a rare birth defect called tibial hemimelia, had been instructed to stay in the shallow end.
But when his mother turned her head, his cousins alerted her that Newton had gone underwater. “I was like: CJ does not know how to swim. What do you mean he’s under the water?” Danielle Lewis, his mother, remembers thinking in distress.
Newton, now 13, is one of Jennifer Simms’ clients. Over more than two decades, Simms has taught hundreds of children, adults and lifeguards — some with varying disabilities or mobility issues — swimming and poolside safety.
She wanted to help her students get past their fear of swimming so they could achieve personal growth. “Swimming gives freedom as water gives life,” she says.
The demand for early childhood and adult swim safety education has increased amid a growing societal awareness of the danger of drowning especially for children. This is especially true in communities of color, whose limited access to pools and swim lessons can have fatal results.
Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children four and under in the U.S., and young people of color are especially at risk. According to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native Americans under 30 are twice as likely to drown as their white counterparts, and for Black Americans the rate is 1.5 times higher. In swimming pools, Black children ages 10-14 years drown at rates 7.6 times higher than white children.
Parents are recognizing that drowning is a major safety issue, which has pushed more adults to seek out formal training for their children and themselves, especially if they also did not have formal swim training. Word of Simms’ swim lesson spread quickly, especially in Acadiana’s Black community.
Teaching children is crucial, but teaching adults is just as important, Simms notes, pointing to an incident in 2010 when six Black teenagers drowned in the Red River near Shreveport, while adult family members stood by, unable to help.
“As you can imagine, everybody started yelling for help,” a spokesperson for the Caddo Parish Sheriff’s Office told ABC News at the time. “Nobody could swim.”
Like her siblings, Simms herself learned how to swim early on at the community pool in Mossville, taking lessons for only 15 cents. Mossville was one of the first settlements founded by formerly enslaved people in the American South, located on the outskirts of Lake Charles, but was later depopulated by industry pollution and buyouts.
She began serving as a lifeguard at her hometown’s public pool when she was 15 and after enrolling at the UL Lafayette (then USL), she lifeguarded at the campus pool, and later became the first Black lifeguard at the city’s OJ Mouton public pool.
But it wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 that she felt called to teach others.
She was working in human resources at the University Medical Center at the time, which received an influx of displaced hospital employees from New Orleans after the storm.
It was her responsibility to transition approximately 600 employees into her facility, doubling its staff. One day, while sitting in her den, her own pool in the backyard, a voice came to her. “The voice said, ‘You‘re selfish,’” she said. “You have a pool, you have one child, and you have a gift. What can you do with it?”
So she began teaching her coworkers right there in her backyard, and she hasn’t stopped teaching since.
But while demand has grown, the accessibility of public and community pool resources has declined.
Lafayette’s public pools, already in short supply, have experienced unsteady operations.
Martin Luther King Swimming Pool experienced several closures over the years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as repairs and maintenance issues. As a result, many of Simms’ elderly students weren’t able to continue lessons, facing a lack of transportation and funds, which led to a rapid decline in health for some, says Maxine Hamilton, senior student who took classes with Simms for years.
“They just stopped,” says Hamilton. “One of our good friends, she’s been on a walker. I mean, it’s amazing how rapidly she went down.”
Hamilton is a retired educator who spent 31 years between UL and the Lafayette Parish School System. She and Simms initially met at USL, but after graduation and Hamilton’s 25-year career in the U.S. Navy Reserves, they lost contact.
But about five years ago, Hamilton began looking for swimming and water aerobics classes because she realized she still had lingering fear and was not completely comfortable with swimming despite her time in the Navy, and she also needed regular, enjoyable exercise. She asked around, and several of her friends recommended Simms, leading to a surprising and pleasant reconnection.
Soon after, she signed her family up for classes. Her fear of water dwindled within a month, and she also noticed improvement in her mobility. Hamilton is 70-years-old, and when she began lessons with Simms, she struggled with knee, back and sciatic nerve issues. Since starting water aerobics, her back and shoulder pain have lessened, and she has not needed treatment like steroid shots.
But Hamilton herself wasn’t able to continue with Simms this year, after her long-time teacher had to relocate her classes to St. Martinville and Opelousas when the opening of MLK Swimming Pool was delayed.
The lack of public pools, especially in minority communities, has historically contributed to lower rates of swimming proficiency in those same neighborhoods.
When white families abandoned city centers for the suburbs in the mid-20th century, they also abandoned public pools, instead building private pools on their properties, along with private swim and country clubs. What ensued was the systemic disinvestment of pools as taxpayer money dried up, increasing city pools closures around the country.
There were also more direct and violent forms of discrimination that kept people of color, especially Black Americans, from utilizing existing resources.
According to a 2024 article from Georgetown University, during the integration of public pools in the 1950s and 1960s, Black Americans who challenged segregation faced severe violence, humiliation and assault. A prominent example of this occurred in 1964 at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, where the hotel manager poured muriatic acid into the pool to burn and disrupt Black protestors at a “swim-in” protesting racial segregation.
“We associate the escape from death as: don’t go there because you’re going to die,” says Simms, “so that fear just began to be taught over the years.”
When Lewis first began searching for lessons, she had a difficult time finding an instructor because she wanted to make sure her son was in an inclusive and accommodating environment for people of color and disabled children. She also wanted an instructor who would treat her son like everyone else.
“I didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him,” says Lewis.
She asked around, and several of her friends directed her to Simm’s Destiny Swim Camp International. “She came highly recommended by everybody I knew,” she says.
Still, their first lessons were anything but a walk in the park.“C.J. gave her hell,” Lewis explains, remembering the first round of lessons with Simms.
Her son cried and screamed profusely during his first sessions because he was intimidated by the size and depth of the pool and frustrated with the instructions, unfamiliar environment and instructor, which left Lewis worried they wouldn’t make it to the second year of lessons.
But this was nothing new to Simms.
Simms realized early on that the fear of water that some children and adults had, coupled with the limited training time, was delaying their progress. So she extended her sessions to an hour to allow extra time, dedicating the first 15 to 30 minutes of a session purely to calming the children down.
If a student is afraid or reluctant in the water, crying, thrashing or screaming, she speaks to them softly, reminding them that they are safe and help is nearby. She blows bubbles, dips her head under and sprinkles her own face with water encouraging students to follow.
“She was just so patient with him,” says Lewis. “She was just hugging him, and she would talk him through it.”
When students are over their initial fear, she moves on to the next steps, practicing survival techniques and proper swim form, rolling onto their backs, grabbing the wall and kicking and standing while they practice arm strokes.
Even advanced students like Newton are coached and corrected. Newton practiced his swim technique focusing on strength, stamina and form. When a student needs extra help, she does not shy away from swimming herself, gliding across the pool to demonstrate correct kicks and swim strokes.
“She has a special talent and concern and genuine interest,” says Hamilton, the former senior student, whose adult son with autism also learned from Simms. “She’s not going to look through you. She sees you.”
Over two years of lessons, Simms guided Newton as he progressed through water safety and swim training. Now, he is training to be a junior lifeguard under Simms mentorship.
He’s got big plans, his mother says: “He told her, ‘Miss Jen, I’m going to be your future Olympian swimmer.’”
