Summer camps should be canceled this year

Thousands of camp organizers are holding out hope of having their camps this summer despite the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s understandable. Young people’s healthy development is at stake, as are billions of dollars in revenue for the nonprofits and colleges that host camps.

But as much as it pains us to say this — and one of us ( John White) feels the sting personally as a camp organizer who has already called off his summer event — we implore organizers to face reality and live up to the ethics that camps so often teach. Their first responsibility is protecting kids and the families to which they return. Cancel camp this year.

Now a part of the fabric of American life, summer camps date back to the 1870s and 1880s, when boys began trekking into undomesticated nature to immerse themselves in experiences that were seen as antidotes to the over-civilizing power of industrial society and cures to “dying of indoor-ness.” These opportunities to escape from urban life proliferated, growing from fewer than 100 in 1900 to more than 1,000 by 1918 and to more than 14,000 camps today, with more than 14 million youth and adults in attendance, according to the American Camp Association.

In addition to the traditional camp experience — think lakes, cabins, canoeing, hiking and sports — many are now far more diverse and highly specialized, immersing campers in everything from performing arts and debate to science and technology.

The American Camp Association notes the unique value and positive power camps hold as educational institutions.

The wholesome world of camp — the open-air classrooms, copious physical activity and company of friends — seems more vital than ever after months of shelter-in-place isolation, with its propensity to exacerbate mental health, obesity and substance abuse problems, not to mention boredom and loneliness.

The health of camp organizations also matters; losing a summer’s worth of revenue will devastate budgets and threaten future programming. This is a major reason that many camp leaders are arguing that as long as their camps can be run safely and responsibly, camp should go forward this summer.

If only they could be run safely and responsibly. The virulence and lethality of the coronavirus, combined with the lack of a vaccine and the distinctive features of summer camp, make that all but impossible.

The ingredients that make camp great also make it dangerous this summer. Camps, by definition, revolve around campers’ up-close-and-personal interactions with counselors and peers. The camp experience happens in crowded gyms, bunk rooms and cafeterias. In the midst of a pandemic, camps provide exactly the right conditions for infectious diseases to spread, not just from camper to camper but in the households to which the campers return.

The best thing camps can do to affirm their integrity and commitment to youth is to cancel camp in this once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis. Online alternatives, although no match for the real thing, can make up for some of this lost experience.

For Christian and other religious camps, there’s a particularly strong imperative to act responsibly and privilege the health of kids and their families. In the world of Christian summer camps — with which John is well familiar as the faculty director of Baylor University’s Faith and Sport Institute’s summer retreat — many organizers claim that all the investment in time, money and effort is justified if just a single “little one” is changed. But what if that little one gets infected and then spreads the contagion back home to elderly grandparents or infects a sibling with a compromised immune system or, worse, dies himself or herself ?

Jesus himself placed a premium on hospitably welcoming children. In the gospels, he warns of harsh consequences for any religious leader who might cause a

“little one” to stumble or who hinders a child from experiencing the fullness of life. These same warnings commandingly hold true for religious camp leaders’ ethical decision-making today.

Going against sound wisdom, ethics, and science is not courage but recklessness, akin to sending scouts out for an overnight hiking trek without tents, food, water, maps and supervision, or plopping a kid into a canoe without a life vest or instruction.

You want to enrich kids’ lives? Keep them home and safe this summer for the sake of happy and healthy summer camps to come.