Float to Form Private Swim Academy

Our Story

Founded in 1966 by Dr. Harvey Barnett, ISR is now the global leader in the industry it pioneered: survival swimming lessons for infants and young children. Our team of nearly 450 highly trained ISR Instructors provides the safest and most effective survival swimming lessons available. The ISR Self-Rescue® instruction our students receive today is the product of over 45 years of research and achieves unparalleled results.

Today, our mission, “Not One More Child Drowns,” is the foundation of everything we do and is the driving force behind ISR’s employees, our independent ISR Instructors, and our major corporate partnerships. We believe the successful prevention of the leading cause of accidental death for children under the age of 4 in the U.S. will require a large group of caring and capable professionals whose sole focus is to save lives. To date, we have delivered more than 8,000,000 ISR Self-Rescue® lessons and saved more than 800 lives.

ISR believes pool fences, supervision, and pool alarms are important parts of a necessary multi-layered approach to drowning prevention. 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 take that ability and teach them skills to potentially save themselves if they find themselves in the water alone.