Last June, Ashley LaRue and Brandon Shenkman got the phone call every parent dreads.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While attending a Westchester County summer camp, their 5-year-old son lost consciousness in a swimming pool.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey found him floating in the pool and my whole body went numb,\u201d Shenkman said.<\/p>\n
A police report from the incident says the boy was saved only when a private swim instructor, not employed by the summer camp, rushed over to administer CPR.\u00a0 A county health inspector, dispatched to investigate the emergency, concluded the summer camp, itself, failed to have enough lifeguards supervising the pool.<\/p>\n
\u201cCampers 4-5 years old [were] allowed in depths of up to 5 ft with no restrictions and no staff in the water,\u201d the inspector wrote.\u00a0\u201cAt the time of the incident it was stated no staff were in the water supervising non-swimmers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The camp, which was hosted and operated by staff at the Saw Mill Club in Mount Kisco, did not respond to the I-Team\u2019s questions about the incident. In the two years leading up to the near-drowning, the health club and its sister facility, Saw Mill Club East, had been cited multiple times for inadequate lifeguard supervision at several pools \u2013 both under the company\u2019s current and prior ownership.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I would have known the issues that had been ongoing, he would never have gone there,\u201d LaRue said of her son.<\/p>\n
LaRue and her husband say their son\u2019s near-drowning demonstrates a gap in New York\u2019s oversight of summer camps and the swimming facilities that often host them. Namely, that there is no easy, centralized way to look up safety records that could be indicators of lapses in water safety.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there were some easy way to pull the history of incidents at a camp, or at another care institution, or an after-school program and just see really what\u2019s going on because there\u2019s no transparency there.\u00a0We would have never sent him there,\u201d Shenkman said.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
The two parents have now filed a lawsuit against the summer camp and its parent company Genesis Health Clubs.\u00a0They\u2019re also calling on New York State lawmakers and regulators to design a user-friendly website where parents can quickly see the safety records of summer camps and the swimming pools that host them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was stunned to see that there is no transparency in this field,\u201d said Steven Dorfman the attorney representing the 5-year-old\u2019s family.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m taking it upon myself to investigate whether or not there could be any legislation that we can push forward to make that type of information known to parents.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is not a novel idea.<\/p>\n
Last year, after years spent studying the issue of water safety, New York\u2019s Temporary Commission to Prevent Childhood Drowning published a report calling for a list of recommendations aimed at saving lives in the water.\u00a0 One of the proposed reforms was for the state to build a \u201cuser-friendly web-based clearinghouse that consolidates all relevant reports and data on drowning and water-related injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTransparency is lacking,\u201d said Kaitlin Krause, a member of the Commission and founder of Rising Tide Effect, a nonprofit that offers swim instruction and water safety workshops to underserved communities.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can create a central platform, user friendly, a clearinghouse type of thing, where can bring in all of the drowning data, the injury reports, the facility safety reports, we would equip parents and communities with way better options to make decisions on where they want to send their families to go and learn to swim.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though Genesis Health Clubs did not respond to questions from the I-Team, last summer the company told News 12 Westchester that it added additional lifeguard staffing and strengthened water safety protocols after the near-drowning.<\/p>\n
Under previous ownership, the Saw Mill Club made headlines in 2018 as the target of a lawsuit from Karen Hinton, a former aide to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.\u00a0She accused the club of negligence after a treadmill accident left her with a severe brain injury.\u00a0In court filings, the health club has denied wrongdoing.\u00a0A trial is scheduled for later this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last June, Ashley LaRue and Brandon Shenkman got the phone call every parent dreads.\u00a0 While attending a Westchester…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":169993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4484,9,11,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-169992","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-i-team","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/169993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}