Let’s keep kids safe in the holidays – with camps

ICAN recall how, as a young teacher-in-training, I did duty at John Power Memorial Camp in Grassy Park during the summer school holiday. In those far-off heady days we learnt our teacher-skills looking after primary schoolchildren who were lucky enough to get a berth – literally and figuratively – in this camp.

We played games during the day, including a march to the beach a few kilometres away. At night it was storytelling time and riddles. We had a house mother who saw to our physical needs, and camp captains to see that we obeyed the rules that nurtured good citizenship.

These halcyon days are upon us again. It is summer and schools are about to close. Hundreds of thousands of children will be released from the 8am to 3pm care of teachers and the empty hours till 6pm or 7pm when mummy and daddy come home from work. Now they will be loose and ranging from dawn till dusk, uncared for and unsupervised.

This is a dire situation. In a conversation with a medical person, it emerged that birth statistics peaked every year around September (count back nine months…) This little statistic is overlooked. We do not connect the dots.

It seems almost criminal to suggest that our children, unsupervised and with no guidance to channel this annual freedom, will sit at home quietly until the adults return. This is a serious hiatus in the constitution’s provision for children. The statistics speak for themselves and can be checked by anyone.

The sub-text contains a message. Our children who are liberated now become libertine. And if our children are not inclined to immoral behaviours, they are still without professional supervision and become soft targets for the predators.

This is not flippantly called the “silly season”. We do not have a plan in place for the children when they stream out of the schools on the last day and become targets or predators.

This is where the private sector could step in. It is a fact that many pre-undergraduates get jobs slinging hash and earning holiday money. The primary school child doesn’t have that option. But the private sector benefits from this child as client for products during the year.

The accrued profits could be siphoned off as tax relief to establish more of these summer camps. It is, in fact, a cult in the United States.

These camps could also be manned by aspirant teachers-in-training, as we were. The only difference would be that we were trained in a college. Today’s teacher-graduates are ineffectually trained in mostly theory in universities.

This is an area where the playing field can be reconfigured after the late Kader Asmal’s unfortunate closing of colleges.

So let’s be pragmatic and harness the agencies that can stop the rot.