There was an IMHO thread about “would you send your child to summer camp”; I thought I’d share the other side of the equation. I work summers in the animal room of a Jewish daycamp in New Jersey; I wasn’t expecting us to be on this year, but we are and here I am. What’s different? What’s the same? Am I crazy? Ask away!
No questions here, just a thanks for helping the kids. I once spent a summer as a volunteer counselor at a sleepaway camp.
How is attendance compared to previous years? Did they have to limit attendance?
Is it called an animal room because of the way the children act?
Will you feel complicit in any Covid spreading caused by the camp because you helped in allowing the camp to happen?
It’s about half capacity.
[quote=“Darren_Garrison, post:4, topic:915438, full:true”]
Is it called an animal room because of the way the children act?[/quote]
No, I meant that it’s a petting zoo, but not in the sense of some outdoor livestock enclosure or something. It’s a room filled with cage-animals like lizards and snakes and rodents.
Camp woulda happened with or without me. At least if I’m there I can try to keep the kids as safe as I can.
Is it day camp or do the children stay overnight?
Are you concerned about the contact the children have had before going to camp, and perhaps ongoing if it’s day camp? Do you ever feel trapped in that respect?
We have seen unfortunately large outbreaks within the Jewish community nearby in NY in both Rockland and lower Westchester, does this concern you?
A day camp. Though the groups within an age group are called “bunks”, probably as a holdover from the older, overnight version.
Honestly, I’m having trouble sorting out exactly what I think about anything. I’m having trouble sorting out exactly why I agreed to come.The last six months have been so overwhelming that I can barely figure out black from white. I’m sitting here trying to reply to you and I realize I don’t know what I think, because I’ve gone through thinking so many different things that I can’t keep track of them. Er, is this making any sense?
It does now.
It seems to have leveled off there in the last couple of months. Last I heard.
What age are the kids? Are you guys wearing masks?
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps if enough people had decided that camp wasn’t worth risking the lives of children, it wouldn’t have opened. Perhaps you could have been the excuse others needed to not participate.
The kids are about… I’d say 5-13?
The kids have to wear masks in the hallways. In the rooms it’s apparently up to the activities counselor. The staff are required to wear masks at all times except during lunch. (I probably should be eating lunch in our room instead of in the cafeteria, it’s just that it’s hard to break six years’ habit of being told to never never bring food in the room because assume everything is covered in poop to be safe; it’s really a question of whether I should be more concerned about corona or salmonella).
Given that, due to a mix-up with the mailing list, I didn’t know camp was even happening until a couple weeks before: yeah, I’m 100% that no one’s decision had anything to do with me.
How is distancing working out?
My wife and I are both products of Jewish overnight camps, and our kids would have been there now for their 8th and 5th years. Their camp officially cancelled about 2 weeks before the province shut them all down. I can’t imagine how they would have distanced with 12 kids plus councillors crammed into a cabin, never mind 650 people in the dining hall at once.
Day camps are running here but limited capacities and no bussing.
In full honesty, if I’d know going into May or June that camp was happening, I probably would have had a long hard think about whether to go. And there’s a good chance I might have stayed home. But I somehow got dropped off their email list, and so the last thing I’d heard from them was a note in April saying,“We’re still hoping to open, but we’ll see what the CDC guidelines are saying when summer gets here.” I took the radio silence to mean they were not, in fact, opening.
Then in June, my brother visited us for the weekend, and his friend who works at the camp came over after lunch. And the friend started talking about the new guidelines and who had to wear masks and so forth. And I was like, " WHAT guidelines? WHAT campers? What do you mean, this year?"
So I went from not thinking about “to camp or not to camp?” at all because I thought no one was camping, to “Omigod I’m late I’m late what did I miss???” panic, and by the time it occurred to me that I had a dilemma on my hands, I had already signed up and promised I’d come.
(edit: I started writing this before FinsToTheLeft posted, I’ll get to you in just a sec)
Weirdly.
Aside from the half capacity, they’ve given the different bunks all different color shirts this year, so the kids have a shorthand for who to hang out with and who to not hang out with. (I accidentally wrote that as “shirthand” at first, heh). The bathrooms have signs on them saying things like “YELLOW and PURPLE only!” or “RED and PINK only!”. Staff are technically supposed to only use the staff bathrooms, but those are locked and my boss never seems to have gotten our key.
At the end of lunchtime, in a normal year; they send the kids into the side cafeteria to dance to a song or two (almost always this one, it’s a good thing I like it or I’d be INSANE by now). This year, they’re having the kids do a circle dance around their individual tables instead.
The staff are eating in the side cafeteria or the patio outside it. There’s a couple of long tables under tents out there. The other day I was eating there with a couple other people and one of the camp heads told us to move. Specifically, he wanted us to stagger ourselves so that we weren’t directly facing someone across the table. I’m… not sure how much more effective that was, considering we were still about two feet away at most. Anyway, most days I just eat with my immediate coworkers from the animal room. I’ve never been a social butterfly outside of that immediate circle. I mean, most of the rest of them are teenagers, and I avoid the staff lounge unless I absolutely have to; the place regularly manages to be even more gross than the room that regularly gets pooped on by lizards.
Speaking of which, there’s no staff lounge this year!
I think there’s some sort of spacing thing with the bunks, but since I don’t go into the bunkrooms I don’t know the details. Each bunk also has its own water cooler, and the you apparently have to wear gloves before using the cafeteria water coolers.
The distancing regimen is a work in progress. Just this morning they announced over the loudspeakers that snack was going to be stationed outside instead of the atrium where everyone usually picks it up. Of course, that meant everyone was just crowding each other going through the doors instead of just crowding each other at the table. At least, that’s what it looked like to me.
For morning carpool, from what I can tell, the bunks have their own tents spaced apart on the sport field. The kids get “temperature gunned”, greeted, and then walk down to their tent. I think the whole bunk goes inside when all their kids get there, which does space things out. I assume there’s also Stuff for afternoon carpool, but I’m outta there by then.
The building is a high school the rest of the year, so there’s plenty of room during activities. The lunche periods are a bit trickier, as is any time between periods when everyone’s in the hallways.
Camp finished today, if anyone has more questions.
Can we assume that you would have mentioned it if anyone had gotten sick?
Yeah. I talked to the camp nurse last Friday-- she said there hadn’t been any cases that the camp knew of. Of course, there’s no way to know if someone was asymptomatic-- there’s no way to know for another two weeks whether someone was presymtomatic-- but there was no one who was sick sick. And no outbreaks in the community.