The disparity the program is working against is documented and stubborn. Black children drown at rates significantly higher than white children nationally, a gap that researchers trace not to any natural aversion but to decades of exclusion from public pools, a shortage of nearby recreational water, and the compounding effect of families in which no one learned to swim passing that absence down. In a neighborhood like Bayview — which sits right on the bay, technically, though the shoreline there has never been set up for leisure — the proximity to water and the distance from swimming instruction can exist in the same zip code.

The program runs out of the Bayview Hunters Point YMCA on Hunters Point Boulevard, and its sessions are structured around safety first: what to do if you fall in, how to float, how not to panic. The more formal stroke instruction comes later. What the instructors are often addressing first is fear — a reasonable fear, given that many of the parents watching from the pool deck never had anyone teach them otherwise.