At the 770-student Eagle Academy Public Charter School in Southeast D.C., swimming is not just recreation, it’s a requirement. The pre-K through third grade school on Wheeler Road has a pool and several swimming instructors.

On any morning around 9:30, you’ll see second and third graders going through their practice drills because the founder and director of Eagle Academy, Cassandra Pinkney, is determined. She said back when she attended Howard University, learning to swim was a requirement for graduation. Though Howard’s since dropped that requirement, Pinkney thought it was a great idea and brought it to her school.

“Every student in this school will swim when they leave Eagle Academy,” said Pinkney, “and we have started by phasing in starting with our third graders, the second graders and we’ll move down to our pre-K.”

She wants the African American children who make up her student body to go against the grain.

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Cherokee County, Ala., authorities say a man died Wednesday afternoon after jumping into a swimming hole known as the “mill hole,” near Little River Canyon National Preserve in the Tucker’s Chapel area in the north end of the county.

According to Cherokee County Sheriff Jeff Shaver, the man, whose identity has not been released, jumped into the water and appeared to struggle when he went under and never resurfaced.

Bystanders jumped in, found the man and pulled him onto the rocks. Their attempts to revive him were unsuccessful, the sheriff said.

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A U.S. Navy SEAL hopeful and his friend, an off-duty lifeguard, were barreling through underwater drills in a pool just 3.5 feet (1 meter) deep. No one realized anything was wrong until their limp, unconscious bodies were noticed beneath the surface.

This summer, nearly four years after those deaths in a Staten Island pool raised alarms about a little known hazard called shallow-water blackout or hypoxic blackout, New York City is putting up warning signs at all public pools prohibiting prolonged breath holding.

It is part of a movement to raise awareness of the peril that has killed accomplished swimmers and to stop it by banning lengthy breath holding in the nation’s estimated 300,000 public pools.

Shallow-water blackout occurs when a person tries to swim underwater for an extraordinarily long time, typically to build endurance. Swimmers often start by taking multiple deep breaths to go a longer distance underwater, causing their blood levels of carbon dioxide to plunge. Once underwater, carbon dioxide levels fail to rise quickly enough to signal the brain to breathe, oxygen levels fall rapidly, and the swimmer faints underwater and drowns.

“Because the swimmer has a low oxygen level at the time of the fainting, brain damage occurs within a couple of minutes, and death is very likely,” a doctor warns in a recent public service announcement. Afterward, Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps urges coaches to end the risky swim team tradition of marathon breath-holding workouts.

New York City and Santa Barbara, California are among the first U.S. cities to outlaw long breath holding in public pools.

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