CAMPS ADAPT
Connecticut summer camps adapt to new coronavirus guidelines
Coronavirus brings change as summer camps in state begin to open.
Before check-in, on a normal morning at Holiday Hill Day Camp in Mansfield, there is usually what owner Dudley Hamlin calls “controlled mayhem” — kids running around or climbing on playground equipment, basketballs flying around the basketball court — before everybody meets under the big tent and the camp starts its daily routine.
In the era of the coronavirus, things are different as summer camps start to open.
“Controlled mayhem is not happening,” said Hamlin, whose family has run the camp for 60 years.
The Holiday Hill campers, who range in age from 3 1/2 to 14, get their temperatures checked when they arrive, then go directly to the new hand-washing station before heading to their designated space where their counselor is waiting.
Holiday Hill is one of 230 licensed summer day camps in Connecticut that opened up this week or will open next week after the coronavirus shutdown. Many camps opted not to open this summer; last year, there were 544 licensed summer camps, according to figures provided by the state’s Office of Early Childhood.
Working with the state’s reopening committee, the Office of Early Childhood issued guidelines for camps, including health recommendations and social distancing and sanitation protocols. In a June 22 update, as the number of coronavirus cases in the state fell, some of the initial guidelines were revised, including not making temperature taking mandatory upon arrival for campers (although some camps are continuing the practice) while group sizes have been increased from 10 to 14.
“I’ve talked to 10-15 directors — to hear the ones who are committed to opening and what they’re going through, they are really on a mission to provide kids with a great summer and a great summer experience,” said Beth Bye, the Office of Early Childhood commissioner.
“They are going to be on the front lines,” Bye said. “Schools were closed, so they’re sort of the first ones to open up.”
No big groups
Everything the campers touch — life jackets, bows and arrows, fishing poles, climbing walls, rope courses — must be sanitized after each use. Counselors and camp employees must wear face masks, although the campers are not required to, in most instances. The campers are kept in groups, called cohorts, of 10 throughout the day, although the new guidelines state that groups of up to 14 are now acceptable.
One of the biggest differences for Jeff Spadaccini, the director at Camp Chase in Burlington and director of day camping for the Greater Hartford YMCA Association, is that his camp is not offering bus transportation this year. Spadaccini said it would have been too difficult to bus different aged children on the same bus who would go to different groups once they arrived at camp.
“Our groups cannot intermingle,” he said. “A couple groups who maybe want to play volleyball against each other, or play soccer or tag or capture the flag — unfortunately, this year, they can’t participate in large or medium size group activities.
“As the camps begin to get larger, they’re going to have to rearrange how they do their assembly programs. At the end of the day, camps do their songs and skits — a lot of them are doing them in much smaller groups so the kids are distant from each other.”
Holiday Hill normally has camp meetings in a big tent. Hamlin moved the meeting to a field for more social distancing between groups, and the “stage” where announcements are made is a hay wagon normally used for hayrides.
“We’re going to do it that way to be together but apart,” he said.
Stephanie Reitz of Glastonbury, whose 11-year-old son Brady is going to Holiday Hill on Monday for the first time, said Hamlin allowed the parents to walk through the camp with him as he explained the camp’s procedures.
“I had a lot of the same questions most parents had about safety and health,” Reitz said. “The director explained point by point what would be happening and how the groups would be structured, and I was very satisfied that my son will be as safe or more there than anywhere else that he could be this summer — unless I locked him in the house, which would be no fun for either one of us.”
Cleaning is another issue for camps. Most surfaces and equipment can be cleaned with normal cleaning solutions, but ropes courses, bowstrings and life jackets cannot be cleaned with certain cleansers like bleach solution because it would damage the equipment, so that equipment must be sanitized in a different manner.
“When they arrive to archery, the kids would use hand sanitizer upon entering the activity,” Spadaccini said. “Each period we’re using a different set of equipment. This way we have time to disinfect everything. Our kids are using gloves when they’re shooting archery, and we throw out the gloves after, because the strings in archery are hard to clean. They go bad if you consistently clean them. We clean the arrows, and those won’t be used until the next group comes.”
Uncertain enrollment
Hamlin, whose camp usually has an average of 250 campers weekly, expects only 150-170 children per week this summer. Camp Chase was at a third of its capacity (about 100 campers) in its first week, but Spadaccini said that was normal and the numbers will grow.
“We have seen an uptick in the last couple weeks of enrollment,” he said.
A number of local park and recreation departments that run summer camps have canceled camp this year. But Avon’s recreation and parks department will start its camp June 29 for children in grades 1-4. Normally, an average of 55 children come to camp weekly, but the town capped the number at 30. The camp, normally held at one of the schools, will be held at Sycamore Hills Recreation Area, where there is an indoor community room, a pool, tennis courts and an outdoor pavilion.
“Without being able to transport children safely, we felt this is a great alternative,” Avon recreation and parks director Ruth Checko said. “[Registration] has been low, but we were only going to run it with the recommendation of 30 campers in groups of 10. We’re almost there, but not quite.
“It was challenging because of the way things were rolled out. A lot of things had to change. What we were thinking in April became different in May and different in June, so it was challenging to follow what the guidelines were because they changed. But once we had direction from the Department of Public Health on the pools, the Office of Early Childhood on the child care guidelines, once all that settled down, it was easy for us to say, ‘This is what it’s going to look like.’”
Checko said they were still planning on doing temperature screenings before camp.
“As of this Monday, the state removed that, but we’re still going to do it. It’s all in place. It’s what we’ve told people we’re going to do. You can’t be too careful.”
In Mansfield, park and recreation director Curt Vincente ended up scrapping the first week of the town’s camp, scheduled to start June 29, because numbers were too low. Vincente needed 34 for the camp to be viable financially, and when only 30 signed up as of June 24, he had to call parents and counselors and tell them the first week was off
Vincente thought there would be a need locally for the town’s camp, because many of the surrounding towns canceled their summer camps.
“We’re holding out hope we will get enough for the next session,” he said. “We had to stick with that hard number because of our budget. We did a lot of preparation, got our staff and got everybody trained. It’s disappointing.”