Troop 1570 and Nu-Finmen Swimming team up to teach water safety to the Uniondale community

For the second year in a row, Uniondale Girl Scout Troop 1570 partnered with Nu-Finmen Swimming to offer a clinic on aquatic safety for youngsters and their parents last Sunday at Kennedy Memorial Park.

The lessons for children included treading water, floating, beginning swimming skills and what to do in an emergency like a potential drowning. The lessons for parents focused on pool etiquette and best practices to ensure a safe pool environment throughout the summer.

This kind of event, Troop 1570 leader Theudia Chambers said, is crucial for communities like Uniondale, where a majority of the population is Black and Hispanic.

“Troop 1570 decided two years ago that we needed to do a water safety, backyard rescue, and pool watchers initiative,” Chambers said, “following an incident where two young residents of Hempstead drowned, and had they had this knowledge, the drownings may have been prevented.”

Nu-Finmen swim coach Jennifer Trotman also stressed the importance of lessons focusing on water safety. “We want to teach about water safety awareness,” she said, “because as you know, it’s minorities inside of urban communities that experience the most drownings out of any other race or community.”

According to a 2020 report by the state Department of Health, since 1987, the drowning rate for white New Yorkers has been 9.35 per 1 million people, while the rate for Black residents is 22 per 1 million, and for Latinos, 12.2 per 1 million. The department acknowledges that there is a clear racial disparity in those rates.

Chambers explained that Troop 1570’s goal is to address this disparity, and provide information so the community can tackle the issue head on.

Trotman said she hoped that by the end of the workshop, both the Girl Scouts and Nu-Finmen “touched a few more lives in the world, and hopefully taught these children and their adults a lifesaving skill that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.”

Trotman’s extensive aquatic resume includes a collegiate swimming career at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where she was an All-Metropolitan competitor. She is also a certified Red Cross instructor with over 30 years of experience as a coach in the Village of Hempstead. She has coached and helped prepare elite athletes at all levels, including All-Americans and Junior Olympians.

Both Nu-Finmen and Troop 1570 have long records of community work. Although this is the second year they have co-hosted a clinic for residents of Uniondale and Hempstead, both have hosted similar lessons separately in years past.

Nu-Finmen has sponsored community events for many years, organizing safety workshops and lessons for Uniondale students, teaching water aerobics to senior citizens, and coaching recreational swim teams. Trotman also emphasized the importance of increasing minority participation in aquatic sports.

Troop 1570 has shown its dedication to empowering its community by creating and distributing care packages to young children in homeless shelters in Uniondale, taking part in a variety of food drives and beach cleanups, and hosting educational initiatives — such as a recent presentation scouts gave on Women’s History Month.

And, with the aquatic safety clinic, the troop and Nu-Finmen offered not only a fun and educational event for children and parents, but also a community-driven way to address the racial disparity in drowning rates. By teaching lifesaving skills, the workshop empowered residents of all backgrounds to enjoy the water safely and confidently.