LO CAL R ES O UR CES / CAM P S : ARTS + ACT I V I T IES
What a Veteran Camp Director Wants You to Know About Summer Camps in 2021 By Patty Lindley David Berkman has worked for the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) camping system for 24 years, and has held the position of director at Camp Kalsman (campkalsman.org) since it opened in 2007. Due in no small measure to his previous experience working in fire and rescue service and as an instructor for the Red Cross, Berkman was tapped last year to guide all of the URJ’s regional camps through their COVID-19 response. ParentMap caught up with Berkman to learn what parents should understand about the safety of camps in 2021. How are you and camp staff preparing to safely operate your camp sessions? The first thing I would tell parents is that [camp staff] view the health and safety of campers as a partnership. We recognize this as a sacred trust that parents put in us. We’re looking not just at Kalsman but across North America for best practices and standards. The American Camp Association [acacamps.org] has released and continues to update some guiding principles and recommendations, obviously following guidelines of state and county departments of health. We brought together a group of doctors from across our system; the medical director of Kalsman also happens to be the medical director of the URJ camping system, Dr. Davia Loren. She’s leading it. [The group includes] the head of the pediatric ICU at Harborview, who is a camper parent and a camp doc. There’s a doc out of the Chicago area who supervises a group of ER doctors. There’s an
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epidemiologist out of Houston, and there’s a chief medical officer of a group of retirement and assisted-living facilities. They all have deep ties to our camping system. We were looking for experts to help guide our decisions who had the credentials, the gravitas and the backbone to be able to tell us, “No, you can’t do this, you can’t do that.” What would you say to a parent who is on the fence about sending their child to summer camp? I think it’s reasonable to be on the fence. [Now is the time] to have that conversation with the leadership of the camp, to get questions answered to your satisfaction and to recognize that not all the answers are available yet. I am having conversations all the time where I say, “We’re talking about it and we’re thinking about it, but it is premature to have that conversation.” For instance: Testing, right? What is it going to look like? Well, I don’t know, because testing has changed so much in the past six months. I know it’s going to change again in the next six months. If I can wait three months to make that decision, to have the best test available on the market? When it comes to your kid’s health and safety, I’m
going to wait three months to make that decision. I would say most camps probably recognize that there’s some level of uncertainty going into the summer, and they should be able to provide you with a really clear refund policy. When are payments due? What happens if the state says [the camp] can’t open or the camp says they’ve decided not to open? What are the refund policies? How is registration looking for Camp Kalsman so far? In the first 24, 48 hours, we normally see maybe 200 kids register. And we saw over 400 of our kids re-enroll. So, there’s a demand for it. Kids need the social interactions, the ability to be outside and the ability to be with friends for their mental health. As adults, we have to balance that with answering the question “How do we keep everybody healthy?” We’ve had over a year to start planning that. I feel much better about our ability to go into this summer than I did in March of last year. What I would caution parents against is not being prepared to send your kids to camp or being stuck without an opportunity for your child as things ... become more comfortable. But parents have to make decisions about
