After a 6-year-old girl drowned in 2019, two men alleged oversight failures by the nonprofit, which certifies 60% of the country’s lifeguards but trains none of them
July 16, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
McCallum remembers responding bluntly: “As bad as it could possibly get.”
The camp’s lifeguards had been certified by an instructor who’d gone rogue — shortening the normally 27-hour class to eight hours, skipping the Red Cross-mandated tests and thus, McCallum believed, leaving the young camp counselors dangerously unprepared to guard a pool filled with energetic children.
The Red Cross never tested the instructor, Andrew Cervantes, and failed to catch what McCallum said were obvious red flags. In his application to be a trainer, Cervantes had listed a neighborhood coffee shop as the location he planned to give lifeguarding classes and, on one of his Red Cross certificates, had listed himself as his own instructor.
Like all Red Cross lifeguard instructors, Cervantes was an independent contractor. And like the vast majority of these instructors, no one at the Red Cross ever audited his work, an investigation by The Washington Post has found.
Cervantes is among dozens of instructors or facilities whose certifications the Red Cross revoked after alleged violations of the rules of its training program, former employees said. Some instructors shortened classes, skipped over critical content or certified people in subjects they themselves had not been trained in, they said.
But the Red Cross learned about these cases only after complaints or, in the case of Cervantes, tragedy. The nonprofit acknowledges it responds to concerns only as they arise and does not routinely test or scrutinize most of its lifeguard trainers, even though every Red Cross lifeguard certificate includes the words “conducted by the American Red Cross.”
Former employees and aquatic safety experts say that the organization’s approach leaves it practically blind to the quality of lifeguarding at its thousands of licensed training providers — swimming pools, summer camps and water parks across the country that proudly advertise their affiliation with the storied D.C.-based nonprofit whose name and logo are synonymous with safety.
The Red Cross stripped away some of its oversight more than a decade ago, as part of an effort to turn around the money-losing training division, former employees said. Training staff were replaced with salespeople who don’t necessarily have expertise in aquatics safety and earn commission on the revenue generated by each training facility they sign up, they said.
In a three-page statement responding to inquiries from The Post, Nicole Maul, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross, said the nonprofit stands behind its science-based training curriculum, administered through manuals, videos and other online teaching resources, and entrusts its licensed training providers to teach the content according to Red Cross protocols.
“The Red Cross does not train lifeguards,” Maul wrote. “The Red Cross issues nearly 6,000 Lifeguarding Instructor certifications each year but once certified, these instructors are not under the supervision of the Red Cross.”
That came as news to Doug Forbes, the father of the 6-year-old girl, who says he chose the camp in part because he believed its Red Cross-certified lifeguards were trained by the Red Cross. On its webpage for lifeguard instruction, the nonprofit calls itself “the most respected source for this training and certification.”
Cervantes, 51, testified in a deposition that he taught all of the skills the Red Cross required, but did it in a shorter period of time than the Red Cross mandates. “It did go much faster than the 27 hours, but they still went over each and every skill,” he testified. Cervantes agreed to an interview at his Los Angeles home but then declined to talk about the case.
Margaret Holm, an attorney for the camp, said her client trusted the Red Cross and assumed Cervantes was properly training its counselors. “Our lifeguards did not receive the full training program from the American Red Cross that we paid for, and the Red Cross apparently knew there were problems within its training programs and did nothing to fix them,” she said in an emailed statement.
Three out of every five lifeguards in the country are certified by the Red Cross, so any problem with the quality of its training can affect the safety of millions of swimmers. Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and experts believe many of these deaths could be prevented if parents and lifeguards were more rigorous about water safety.
“If I take my kids to a public pool now, I don’t rely on the lifeguards,” said McCallum, 45, who was laid off from the Red Cross during an organizational restructuring earlier this year. “I can’t be a hundred percent confident that those lifeguards have been trained to standard, because of what I know.”
McCallum, who from 2017 until early 2023 led the team reviewing complaints against Red Cross trainers, said he saw hundreds of cases of deficient training a year. About twice a month, he caught someone self-certifying or certifying others in skills the trainer was never qualified to teach — a loophole in the Red Cross software system.
Maul, the Red Cross spokeswoman, said the nonprofit investigates concerns about poor training and in some rare instances suspends or revokes an instructor’s certification for deviations from the curriculum. She declined to share data.
Maul said McCallum has made “numerous mischaracterizations and distortions about our certification process” since he lost his job, but she did not specify what they were. McCallum said he has only told the truth.
Maul declined to comment on McCallum’s claim that instructors have fraudulently certified themselves and others, but said that since Red Cross upgraded its training software in late 2019, “instructors cannot submit a course record if they are not certified to teach that particular course.”
Former employees who have accessed the newer system disagree. They said anyone certified in a skill such as lifeguard training can issue new certificates for a host of related skills, such as waterfront lifeguarding, regardless of whether the person was ever trained in those skills, the people said.
The Red Cross declined to comment on this claim.
The American Red Cross has trained water safety and first-aid instructors for over 100 years, and for most of that time, its training division was run as a safety advocacy group. Chapter offices throughout the country sent safety experts to oversee courses for new lifeguard instructors and make sure they were following the curriculum, said Gerald Dworkin, who ran safety for Red Cross chapters in Westchester County, N.Y., and Houston in the 1970s and 1980s and who is an expert witness in a lawsuit against the Red Cross.
This model shifted after the 2008 hiring of CEO Gail McGovern, a former AT&T executive, who reimagined the training division as a business driver, the former employees said. She closed chapter offices, cut employees and rewarded salespeople for signing up new training partners with minimal vetting, they said.
Maul said the Red Cross closed chapters to reduce duplication. She declined to answer questions about the sales strategy or make McGovern, who is still CEO, available for an interview.
McGovern set an aggressive target of $680 million in training revenue by 2016 — more than four times the group’s sales the year she was hired — according to an internal document published by the investigative news outlet ProPublica in 2015. The Red Cross declined to comment on this figure.
The Red Cross requires instructors to be affiliated with an organization, but no one at the nonprofit checks business licenses or insurance information, performs site visits, or calls the businesses to confirm their affiliation with the trainers, former employees and Red Cross licensed training providers said. “We took them at face value,” said Deb Adams, a former Red Cross salesperson in Dallas. Maul declined to comment.
This honor system extended to instructors’ daily operations. For the most part, trainers independently create courses and generate certifications in the Red Cross database with no one at the nonprofit checking their work, former employees and licensed training providers said. Using a software system called Saba, first installed in 2011, instructors could generate any certificate for any student, regardless of whether the instructor or the student had the necessary prerequisites, these people said.
Soon after McCallum was assigned to investigate trainers in 2017, one of his first big cases was a complaint about a former Red Cross employee who was abusing his access to Saba. According to McCallum, the former employee had certified himself in Emergency Medical Response — one of the most intensive training courses offered by the Red Cross — and then certified several faculty members at Henry Ford College, in Dearborn, Mich., as Emergency Medical Response instructors.
The Red Cross banned the former employee and revoked the certificates issued by him and his students, according to records obtained by The Post in a Freedom of Information Act request. The Red Cross declined to comment on specific cases of deficient training. Rhonda DeLong, a spokeswoman for Henry Ford College, said the school cooperated with the Red Cross’s review process, during which all eligible students were properly trained and certified.
Red Cross executives sometimes decided it wasn’t worth revoking trainers for bad behavior, former employees said. “If we drop the hammer on somebody, we are going to lose them as a client and subsequently lose that revenue that was coming in,” said one former Red Cross salesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss internal matters.
In one case, McCallum said he wanted to revoke someone’s training license in Tennessee for holding a CPR class with 75 trainees and a single instructor instead of the five that were required by Red Cross rules. He said he was overruled by a superior, and the trainees were all permitted to keep their certificates.
In some cases, revoked trainers returned using different names. One lifeguard training business in Long Island has been permanently banned from the Red Cross four different times, under four different names, according to a list of banned trainers published by the Red Cross in a May 2023 newsletter to instructors. After investigating and banning one trainer, McCallum and his team realized the same person had rejoined the Red Cross several times using the names of different Marvel and DC comic characters — including Alfred, the name of Batman’s butler.
Maul declined to comment on these cases or explain how the organization screens new trainers.
The Red Cross offers lifeguard auditing to facilities wishing to pay thousands of dollars a year for the service, but because many pools want certified lifeguards for the lowest cost possible, few of them ever sign up, former employees said. Jeff Ellis & Associates, the largest competitor to the Red Cross in lifeguard training, requires all customers to have their lifeguards audited at least once year, the company said in an interview.
According to Red Cross financial statements, revenue from its training services division has never surpassed $150 million since McGovern’s first year on the job, despite restructuring and shifting emphasis to sales from oversight. The division lost money every year of her tenure until 2021, when its revenue exceeded costs by $13 million, and 2022, when it contributed $18 million to the bottom line.
Cervantes, a native of East L.A., became an instructor for the Red Cross after years of lifeguarding at community pools. When a Red Cross salesperson told him he needed to be affiliated with an organization to keep training, he applied to become an authorized provider of lifeguard and CPR training under Holy Grounds Coffee & Tea.
Cervantes, who worked at the shop as an off-the-books art curator, never notified the coffee shop and was never authorized to teach lifeguarding classes there, according to Steve Boland, who owned the shop at the time but has since sold it. “The Red Cross should have called me,” Boland said. “I never would have signed anything like that.” Cervantes declined to comment.
Nayeli Trejos, a Red Cross salesperson, said in a deposition that she never audited Cervantes’s courses because that was “not within my scope of work.” The Red Cross declined to comment further.
Summerkids, an idyllic day camp in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, hired Cervantes to train its lifeguards every year from 2015 through 2019 — the year that 6-year-old Roxie Forbes died. Though Cervantes testified that he knew Red Cross lifeguard training should be around 27 hours, he said that during several of those years, he conducted the training in eight hours.
Holm, the camp’s attorney, said no one from Summerkids ever suggested reducing the length of the training. She said her client did not know what length of time the Red Cross recommended for lifeguard training, nor did Cervantes advise them. Summerkids has been operated by the same family for over 40 years.
The Red Cross requires lifeguards and lifeguard trainers to renew their certifications every two years by training with a qualified instructor. In 2016 and 2018, Cervantes issued himself certificates in lifeguarding using his name as his own instructor — a violation of Red Cross rules McCallum says was possible only because of the Saba computer system loophole.
Maul said Cervantes’s decisions were a “clear violation” of Red Cross policies, which led to him ultimately being revoked, but declined to comment on him further.
At the camp, lifeguarding was viewed by counselors as a relaxing break from an otherwise challenging job working with small children in the hot Southern California sun, said one former Summerkids counselor who asked not to be named because she feared retribution from the camp’s owners. Camille Pinsonnault, who was a Summerkids counselor from 2014 through 2017, didn’t take lifeguard training, but said some of her fellow counselors who were trained by Cervantes told her it was “really, really easy to pass.” Cervantes testified that he never failed any Summerkids counselors who trained to be lifeguards.
When Cervantes trained counselors the weekend before camp in June 2019, he never administered the mandatory written test, which the Red Cross describes in its training materials as a “detailed examination” of a student’s knowledge and comprehension. He later said in a deposition that he verbally tested students’ knowledge throughout the day, but because he didn’t have any written tests with him, he “made a judgment call to forego the test.”
On the morning she drowned, Roxie was one of about 30 young swimmers in a 20-by-50-foot pool guarded by four camp counselors, all of whom Cervantes had certified as Red Cross lifeguards. Because she had failed to pass a swim test at the beginning of camp, Roxie was one of several designated “non-swimmers” who were supposed to remain standing on the steps anytime they were in the pool.
Soon after the kids entered the water, three of the lifeguards became preoccupied, according to statements they later gave. Hank Rainey, who was in the water and closest to Roxie, testified that he turned away from her to help a camper who was crying. Joseph Natalizio, who sat in the only lifeguard chair, told police that he climbed down from the chair to attend to a camper who had just been stung by a bee. Natalie Del Castillo testified that she was tossing diving sticks into the deep end for a camper to retrieve.
Holm, the lawyer for Summerkids, said the counselors were doing their jobs attending to campers who needed their help.
A counselor who was standing in the grass outside the pool area said he was the first person to notice Roxie floating face down with her hair splayed out, according to the police report. He alerted the lifeguards, who pulled Roxie out of the pool and unsuccessfully performed CPR while someone called 911. Roxie was rushed to the hospital. She was pronounced dead the next day.
An email Summerkids sent to parents the day of the drowning said a counselor had spoken to the child approximately 10 to 15 seconds before she was spotted floating. But the coroner who examined her body said she had likely taken “minutes” to drown. In testimonies, medical and aquatic safety experts who reviewed the evidence estimated a wide range of times of the drowning, from 30 seconds to 10 minutes.
Alison Osinski, an aquatics safety expert hired by Roxie’s parents, said Roxie likely drowned in part because the lifeguards didn’t know how to properly scan a pool or recognize drowning behavior. The Red Cross lifeguarding manual teaches students about a 30-second rule for surveilling a pool. Each lifeguard should be able to scan their defined area of responsibility and physically respond to any problem within 30 seconds, the Red Cross says.
In depositions, three of the four lifeguards said they had been trained to scan the pool but were not aware of a specific amount of time they were supposed to scan. Natalizio was never deposed. None of the four responded to requests for comment.
Tom Griffiths, an aquatics expert hired by Summerkids, testified that drowning victims sometimes display little or no struggle near the surface of the water, making them difficult to spot by “even the best trained and supervised lifeguards.”
Roxie’s dad lives alone atop a hill in the L.A. suburb of Pasadena, in a quiet house filled with photos of his dead daughter. In the summer, he hears kids splashing and giggling in a neighbor’s pool, and looks outside to his own pool, which has mostly sat empty for four years.
The drowning sent Forbes — a marketing consultant who was studying for a master’s degree in journalism at the time — on a relentless pursuit for answers. He discovered Cervantes’s self-certification. He learned about the shortened training and the coffee shop. He questioned the Red Cross and how it had let Cervantes slip through.
“This became a job,” Forbes, 58, said in an interview at his home. “This became a way of honoring Roxie.”
Forbes sued the summer camp, the lifeguards and Cervantes. And when the Red Cross failed to acknowledge what he said were flaws in its certification program, he sued the nonprofit, alleging that it fraudulently assured the public of Cervantes’s qualifications when it published his self-generated certificates on the Red Cross website.
Attorneys for the Red Cross have argued that the organization never made any false representations about the quality of its lifeguard training to Forbes or his family.
In April of this year, Judge John Kronstadt of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that Forbes did not adequately allege the Red Cross committed fraud. But the same week, Forbes received a message that he said opened a new door in his investigation.
“I’m reaching out to you as the former head of the American Red Cross’ quality assurance department,” McCallum wrote in his first email to Forbes after leaving his job. At the time of Roxie’s death, the Red Cross “was fully aware of the holes and deficiencies in their certification programs and chose to do nothing about it.”
McCallum had become disillusioned after Roxie’s death. Red Cross executives said they wanted to fix the problems that led to deficient training. But for years, he said, they refused to make simple changes he proposed, such as requiring new trainers to provide photo IDs and generating an automatic alert anytime the instructor’s name was the same as the student’s.
When McCallum was laid off, he said he chose to forfeit 12 weeks of severance pay to avoid signing a nondisclosure agreement. On June 16, he provided a statement in Forbes’s lawsuit, hoping his insider account would persuade Kronstadt to reverse his decision and allow the Red Cross’s role in the events that led to Roxie’s death to be further litigated. The Red Cross has until July 19 to respond.
Forbes, who said he has turned down settlement offers from Summerkids and the Red Cross, says he wants them to acknowledge their mistakes: “I want somebody to say, I screwed up so badly that your child died.”
Magda Jean-Louis and Cat Schuknecht contributed to this report.