I’m really disappointed about the negative experiences reported at some of the Y’s. My older girl learned to swim at our local Y and was a swim team kid so we spent alot of time in the pool division.
The coach was a stickler, but the staff bent over backwards to work out ways to teach my older daughter how to swim (she was a terrible swimmer and had some behavior issues for a long time). We went to Easter Seals later on for Eleanor, but everyone at our Y said if we wanted to try to teach her to swim there, they would see what they could do to make it happen (we decided against it because of the water temp and Easter Seals is closer).
I don’t know how uniform or individual the allowances are at these various programs are (maybe we were just lucky?), but it’s still disappointing to hear about this.

Good luck!

Our experience was less than satisfactory. Over the next 1.5 years I struggled for consistency. They changed his instructor constantly without notice. I paid by the month, and 50% of the time they double booked and every single time told my son “sorry”, never the other kid. They would then want him to wait 45 minutes. Why not ever the other kids, who were NT and had no problem waiting and their parents didn’t have an infant like I did, so they could have gone in the water to play with their kids while they waited. There were some days no one ever showed up to give the lesson even though it was on the books and I had paid. They never apologized once. After 1.5 years of patiently trying to explain autism to them and why consistency is important, routine is important, I gave up. The last day there I complained to the director, who said there was nothing they could do. I asked for my money back for the last lesson they never gave and they refused to refund it, and refused to give him one last make-up lesson because I canceled the membership at the end of that month, since he wasn’t being given the lessons paid for.

They didn’t care about my son, and I’m fairly sure they treated the other special needs kids about the same.

I’m not impressed with the YMCA’s service. Maybe they would be different at another one, but it was so stressful to get those swim lessons, I just don’t want to face it.

This year he was able to swim weekly at the local college. His school takes the special needs kids every Thursday morning, and he loved it!

I have signed up my son with the local college’s day camp this summer. He will be able to swim daily there, and they have 5 other autistic kids that attend in the summer. The nurse’s son is one of them and has educated the staff and keeps an eye every day on each of the kids. They also employ one of the special ed teachers from the local school to be an instructor. He will get to learn all the typical things kids learn at camp and he is so excited about it!

I do plan on buying CPR anytime so that I know how to do this, just in case.