Camp
What’s Your Camp’s Vaccination Policy? Last year’s measles outbreaks in the U.S. led camps to review rules.
By Jennifer Lesser Measles outbreaks across the country in 2019 prompted summer camps to look at how, or whether, they should accommodate vaccine-hesitant parents and could reassure parents of vaccinated children that they won’t be exposed to the disease. “Like everything else, the issue of what camps are doing about vaccinations falls on a bell curve — there are some camps doing very little and some are requiring detailed vaccination records to be updated on an annual basis,” explains Harry Rhulen, founder and CEO of Crisis Risk, a risk management company. He notes that, generally, corporate-owned camps enforce tighter vaccination restrictions than a smaller, family-owned camp that has been running for many years. “Sometimes these camps will tell me that they’ve been doing it a certain way for 100 years and haven’t had a problem, and our response is always one single word: ‘yet.’”
Impact of New York outbreak
Susie Lupert, executive director of the American Camp Association (ACA) of NY and NJ, says licensed summer camps in both states have to keep vaccination records and campers should be immunized according to state requirements or be able to present a medical or religious exemption. However, as a result of the measles outbreak in Brooklyn last year, camps contacted parents to encourage them to immunize their children and many camps refused to accept religious exemptions to protect the overall camp population from a measles outbreak. New Jersey schools and camps may have to follow suit; a pending bill would require all students attending public schools to be vaccinated,
10 MetroKids.com
regardless of religious beliefs, health conditions, or any other exemptions that were previously accepted. The bill has angered some parents and is currently stalled in the legislature. “Last year was a unique summer for camps. Many had to revise their vaccination policy for the summer, only accepting campers and staff that were vaccinated for measles and if a camp did accept unvaccinated children, they were tracking the campers for symptoms,” Lupert explains. “Camp owners and directors were working closely with their healthcare staff to ensure they understood the symptoms of measles and that a procedure was in place to seek medical care if measles were suspected.” “When it seems like nobody really wants to take a stand on the issue because it will draw the ire of many parents, it puts camps like ours in a precarious position.” Lupert says many camp directors reached out to the families who hadn’t vaccinated their children and told them that if they didn’t vaccinate for measles, their child would be unable to attend camp. “Surprisingly, many parents ended up vaccinating,” she recalls.
how to handle this issue, but we were unfortunately pretty much left on our own since there were no confirmed outbreaks in New Jersey,” he explains. “It was left up to camp directors to decide whether to tell families who have been with us for years that they’re no longer welcome in our camp community because their children aren’t vaccinated, at the risk of making other parents nervous.” The camp ultimately decided to make vaccinations mandatory, but consulted with its insurance company to come up with a compromise for one family of two unvaccinated campers — they had to take a blood test to prove that they weren’t carriers of any sort of communicable disease before they would be permitted to enroll. “The general rule for camps is to follow what public schools are doing, but when it seems like nobody really wants to take a stand on the issue because it will draw the ire of many parents, it puts camps like ours in a precarious position,” he adds. “My son battled leukemia, and
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Local camps respond
According to Andy Pritikin, owner and director of Liberty Lake Day Camp in Bordentown, NJ and past president of the ACA, many camps struggled to make a decision about vaccinations last summer and will continue to face challenges this season. “When we heard about the outbreak in New York last year, we were hoping for some sort of governmental decree in our state that would advise us
MARCH 2020
