ter the daily maintenance of the pool. Fortunately, Eddie was found inside— floating on his back—just as he had learned.
Teaching Children
Water Survival Skills
It
The ISR program emphasizes that competence leads to confidence. “Once they become competent and know what they're doing, we see the love of the water come,” says Emma. There are programs that teach kids to enjoy the water first before learning any skills, but she thinks that may be dangerous. A child might be drawn to the water even more without having any skills. The ISR instructors encourage the kids to become skilled first, and then they encourage them to use the skills to have fun. They are survival skills, but
BY ELIZABETH DEAL
can take less than a minute for a child to drown.
Preliminary data from the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) shows that 25 infants and children died from drowning in 2021. Between 2017-19, drowning was the third leading cause of injury-related death in Louisiana children (0-14) with top risk factors being child unable to swim (96%), not supervised (72%) and no barriers to water (54%).
REPROGRAPHICS, ART/ BUSINESS CARDS, BA DOCUMENT MANAG
Extremely passionate about teaching water survival skills are Tara Hardin, Emma Burnett, Ashton Hardin, and Hallie Horne of ISR ArkLaTex. They are instructors certified through Infant Swim Resource (ISR), a national organization founded in 1966 by Dr. Harvey Barnett. The goal of ISR is to teach safety and survival. At a minimum, a child will learn to roll onto his or her back to float, rest, and breathe, and to maintain this position until help arrives. Children as young as six months can learn to save themselves. According to the ISR website, the ISR Self-Rescue® instruction for students is the product of over 45 years of research and achieves unparalleled results.
THINK BIG.
Tara is the mother of Emma and Ashton, and Hallie is her close friend. They are part of over 300,000 ISR graduates, and they are also CPR certified. ISR has over 800 documented survival stories, one which hits very close to home. Emma’s own son, Eddie, is proof that the ISR survival skills work. As a toddler, having already completed the ISR course, Eddie fell into a body of water adjacent to a pool. No one was aware that a grate covering had not been replaced af-
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they can be used for recreational swimming as well.
To become a certified ISR instructor, individuals undergo two weeks of academic training and six weeks of in-water training, conducted by a master instructor.
ISR lessons are one-on-one for 10 minutes a day, five days a week, and last about four to six weeks. The child works with the same ISR instructor every day, so they pick up right where they left off the day before. “We teach the short, frequent lessons because that's how kids learn. When we watch our kids learning how to crawl or learning how to walk, we don’t see them practicing it for 30 minutes once a week. We see them doing it every day, little, short spurts of practice. So, we're meeting them with what their attention spans are able to handle. It’s physically challenging and a lot of work, so 10 minutes is enough,” Emma explains. “Initially, we see kids are nervous. They're not very comfortable in the beginning of lessons. We're asking them to do so many new things in a short amount of time. But our job
