With summer here, New Yorkers are increasingly likely to encounter water, whether at the beach or in flooded streets during intense storms. In those moments, our understanding of and preparedness for water are being tested in real time.

We don’t have to look back far to see when a significant disconnection from the water became embedded in the way our city was built. Over the course of the last century, New York’s economy shifted from one rooted in maritime industry to one centered on Wall Street. City blocks were built over wetlands and natural springs. Highways built under Robert Moses cut many neighborhoods off from their waterfronts. Pollution made water bodies unsafe, and vacant industrial sites sat abandoned for decades, leaving once-thriving working waterfronts to decay.

Over time, these changes reshaped not only our shoreline but also our relationship with the water that surrounds us. The lack of equitable access to safe places to swim and to water safety education has widened this gap even further, leaving millions of New Yorkers, generation after generation, vulnerable to water-related trauma and drowning.

While the data remains incomplete, the consequences are not. Year after year, too many people, often young New Yorkers lose their lives along a stretch of our public beaches. During flash floods, others drown in their own basements. These are not isolated tragedies; they are symptoms of a city that has become disconnected from the water that surrounds it.

So in 2026, an important question remains: How are we building our relationship with water and preparing the next generation to live safely alongside it?

At the state level, the Water Safety Coalition, Assemblymember Stacey Pheffer Amato, and Senator Joe Addabbo continue to champion A1080/S9480, the Water Safety Education in Schools Act.  The bill would require land-based water safety education in schools statewide, ensuring every child in New York, kindergarten through 12th grade, learns how to recognize risk in and around the water.

The bill stalled in committee and didn’t make it to the floor this session. The challenge isn’t funding or implementation, but broader resistance to adding new curriculum requirements. The Coalition is working to better understand those barriers and build a path forward for the next legislative session.

This isn’t uncharted territory. New York City once required swimming instruction and swim testing in schools with pools, helping create more water-competent young people while supporting a pipeline of future lifeguards.

What’s being proposed now is more modest: classroom-based safety education, not swim instruction. If the city once required the more intensive version of this education, there is reason to believe it can support this accessible baseline for every student.

There’s a foundation of community and momentum now that didn’t exist even a few years ago. But for that foundation to matter, everyone must have access to the same basic knowledge. Water safety should be taught in schools, just as fire safety and traffic safety are, creating a common foundation for every child, regardless of zip code.

The work still needs to get done; it can’t wait for legislation to happen. Across the city, a coalition of advocates, agencies, and organizations is already turning ideas into action, at every stage from incubation to proven impact.

The Design Trust for Public Space issued its 12th RFP cycle, “Water: Designing an Equitable Water Future for New York City,” and selected a cohort of genuinely exciting projects to incubate over the next nine months: accessible drinking water, flood memory toolkits, aquatic agriculture, floating homes, and my own project, a civic design initiative to embed water literacy into the fabric of New York City, reshaping how New Yorkers understand, live with, and connect to water across public space, infrastructure, and everyday life.

Meanwhile, Rising Tide Effect continues its own public safety education work under its Water Wise campaign. Its first chapter, Respect the Rip, is currently running on the MTA, bringing lifesaving information directly to some of the city’s most underserved and at-risk communities before they ever reach the beach. Its second chapter, A Mother’s Voice, highlights the human stories behind water safety statistics and the lasting impacts of preventable loss.

Through Swim Corps, RTE’s earn-while-you-learn program, more than 100 young people are gaining swimming skills, water safety training, and exposure to careers in the blue economy. Now in its fourth season with its largest cohort yet, the program reflects one mission: water safety knowledge for the communities that need it most and a city finally free to know the water with joy, not fear.

Plus Pool‘s floating prototype gets us even closer to safely swimming in the East River for the first time in over a century. Prospect Swims is asking whether a 60-acre lake in Brooklyn could one day be swimmable, placing both projects and New York alongside the Global Swimmable Cities initiative, a reminder that the greatest city in the world still isn’t leading on water safety or swimmability, even though water has shaped nearly every part of its history.

The city budget included a new $750K Swim Safety initiative for land-based water safety education and swim instruction, the result of nearly three years of advocacy by the NYC Lifeguard and Aquatics Taskforce.

There are also encouraging efforts underway. Making Waves, a free swimming and water safety program led by the New York City Health Department, continues to expand opportunities for children across the city. Similarly, the Wave Makers initiative—a now publicly funded program originally launched by the Gray Foundation, the offices of New York City Council Members Julie Menin and Shekar Krishnan, and Asphalt Green’s Safe Swim NYC—is increasing their impact and aims to teach approximately 9,000 of New York City’s roughly 70,000 second graders to swim during the coming school year.

We know from Mayor Bloomberg’s Swim for Life program that school-day swimming can be successfully delivered to tens of thousands of students. All of these initiatives offer real hope that New York City is once again moving toward providing meaningful access to swimming and water safety education for more students than it has in years.

Water safety touches every part of life in this island city. When people continue to enter dangerous waters without recognizing the risks, or when residents remain vulnerable during flash floods, the question isn’t simply whether we’re doing enough—it’s whether what we’re doing is truly reaching the New Yorkers who need it most.

As we confront the challenges of today and beyond, we must keep the bottom line in mind: ensuring that the water finally belongs to all of us.