Booming enrollment: Summer camp spots filling up fast due to high demand

It’s not yet spring, but the camps where many children will spend their summer months are filling up fast.

Camp directors are reporting booming enrollment after three summers affected to varying degrees by the pandemic.

“I think many parents discovered the value of camp during COVID when people were inside and cooped up,” said Alicia Skovera, executive director of the American Camp Association, New York and New Jersey. “COVID is absolutely driving the demand. Families saw the benefits of getting outdoors and how important it is for young people to socialize.”

The Meadowlands YMCA opened its camp registration in early January, anticipating high demand, and it's already near capacity two months later, even with the addition of new programs.

Last year, it took until April for the Y to register the same number of campers, said Andrea Fernandez, the senior child care director with the Meadowlands YMCA.

“When we saw the numbers in the first two weeks, we knew we weren’t going to have enough space,” she said.

To meet the demand, which she attributed to a combination of more parents going back to in-person work and fewer pandemic-related restrictions and concerns, the Y partnered with Field Station: Dinosaurs in Leonia to add another four-week camp option for 60 children.

Scott Leonard and Dani Suchow, directors of Poconos Springs in Pennsylvania, a sleepaway camp that serves many children from North Jersey, said parents had waited the past two years to see what the COVID situation and safety protocols would be before signing up. The camp was closed in the summer of 2020 and reopened the following year.

“COVID really threw a curveball in camp enrollment cycles,” Leonard said. “Now it feels like families are feeling more confident that we’ll have a more normal summer and are able to make their decisions quicker.”

Other families who had never considered sending their children to camp are seeing it as an opportunity for them to regain some social skills lost during the pandemic, Suchow said.

“We love that we can give campers a safe environment to learn all those life skills that aren’t necessarily practiced in the classroom,” she said. “From a social standpoint, campers are relearning how to navigate living with other peers and being in a community together.”

Over the past few years children may have spent more hours looking at screens than their parents would have liked — doing virtual learning on a computer or watching television and playing video games at home, said Jason Samuel at the Nature Place Day Camp in Rockland County.

Those families are eyeing summer camp as a place their children can put down their devices, get outside and form new friendships.

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“At camp, kids develop skills like art, drama and outdoor cooking, but also the softer social skills — problem solving, teamwork and friendship making — that really deteriorated because of the pandemic,” he said.

Enrollment at Nature Place is ahead of last year’s and approaching capacity, Samuel said.

“If a family is thinking of signing up for summer camp this year, they should really start making their plans now,” he said. “That’s the advice I’m telling families. If they wait until May their options are going to be limited.”

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: COVID effect: Summer camp spots filling up fast due to high demand