By NEAL WAGNER / Managing Editor

ALABASTER – For Meadow View Elementary School second-grader Peyton Boykin, the week of Oct. 5-9 was a milestone.

While participating in the Alabaster City School System’s learn to swim program, which is a partnership between ACS and the Alabaster YMCA, Boykin learned an important potentially life-saving lesson.

“It’s been fun. I learned new things I didn’t know, like how to float on my back if I get tired,” Boykin said as he exited the YMCA’s pool on the afternoon of Oct. 8. “Nobody else has been able to teach me how to do that.”

Boykin was among hundreds of MVES second-graders who either learned to swim or honed their swimming skills at the YMCA through a partnership stemming from a 2014 Leadership Shelby County project. Through the program, all second-graders in the Alabaster School System will spend one week this school year learning to swim at the YMCA.

While in the water, students were separated into multiple groups depending on their swimming skills while YMCA lifeguards conducted water activities with them.

Boykin was especially complementary of the YMCA staff and the Alabaster facility.

“It’s a cool place, and there are a lot of different things they use to teach you how to swim,” Boykin said before running to jump into the pool one more time before his class moved on to the classroom portion of the program.

His classmate, Megan Maynor, was also a fan of jumping from the starting blocks into the water. Like Boykin, she also said learning to float on her back was the most important thing she had learned in the program.

“You lay back and you just have to kick your feet,” Maynor said. “I had no idea that was even possible.”

For many of the second-graders, Oct. 5 was the first time they had ever been in a body of water.

“It’s amazing how many of them there are that this is the first time they’ve been in a pool,” said YMCA Sports and Aquatics Program Director Chris Honeycutt, noting some kids who swam for the first time in last year’s learn to swim program are now on the YMCA swim team.

“Now, anytime they are at a lake with their family or at the creek or the beach, they will have a lot of good skills at their disposal if anything ever happens,” he added.