Children take part in early swim education camp at Boys and Girls Club of Passaic

PASSAIC — Skyler H. wants to lose the water wings when she swims in her grandma’s pool.

Liam really wants to go swim in the deep end.

With the help of the responsible adults at the Boys & Girls Club of Paterson and Passaic and the ZAC Foundation, the city children will learn to swim and not be among the 4,500 young Americans who drown each year.

The foundation, started by the family of Zachary Cohn, a Connecticut 6-year-old who died from drowning in 2007, is part of a four-day water safety camp from Tuesday through Friday hosted at the Boys & Girls Club of Paterson and Passaic. There were more than 100 grade-school-age children at the camp on Tuesday.

The foundation has held its camps in Paterson in the past, but this is the first year it has become involved with Passaic children. The city and local leaders welcomed the organization to the city.

Water safety, after all, is an oft-neglected part of most children’s education and is particularly hard to teach to inner-city youth, ZAC Foundation educator Michael Inganamort told the Boys & Girls Club and community leaders.

With an estimated 18,000 school-age children in Paterson and 13,000 in Passaic, and just a handful of pools between the two communities, teaching them to swim can be difficult.

Even getting districts or the state education system to incorporate water safety courses into the school curriculum is a tough sell, despite the sobering statistics on drownings among city children.