ISR was founded in 1966 by Dr. Harvey Barnett and is now recognized as the global leader in providing survival swimming lessons for infants and young children. The ISR team consists of over 800 highly trained Instructors who provide the safest and most effective survival swimming lessons available. The ISR Self-Rescue® instruction which students receive today is the product of 50+ years of research and achieves unparalleled results. 

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ISR believes pool fences, supervision, and pool alarms are important parts of a necessary multi-layered approach to preventing children from drowning. However, traditional lines of defense break down, and the over 4,000 drowning deaths per year bear a grim testament to the fact that traditional approaches are missing a key component: the child. ISR’s core conviction is that the child is the most important part of a drowning prevention strategy and our over 300,000 ISR graduates and 800 documented survival stories are proof that children can save themselves. Children are curious, capable, and have an uncanny ability to overcome obstacles like pool fences; at ISR we teach them skills to save themselves if they fall in the water alone.