07.4 Selecting a Camp: Quality

QUALITY

When evaluating a camp, you should ask: What accreditation, certification, and training do the camp and its staff possess?  These things don’t guarantee high quality, but they set minimum requirements for health, safety, and skill.  Here are the specific “Quality” questions to know:

Is the camp accredited? 

• Accreditation.  According to the American Camping Association, and “ACA-accredited” camp is one that has “met or exceeded the highest nationally recognized standards for health, safety, staff-training, and program quality.”  About 25% of the camps in the U.S. have earned ACA accreditation.  Some 6% of camps who try for accreditation don’t pass inspection; other camps are not interested in accreditation.  Are the camps you’re considering accredited, either by the ACA or by some other organization?

Points to Remember about Accreditation.  As a smart shopper for camps, you must remember six things about accreditation.

1. Accreditation tells you a lot, but not everything, about the camp’s quality.  The ACA is an outstanding organization with very high inspection standards.  However, some non-accredited camps set their own excellent standards.
2. No parent could ever inspect everything that trained inspectors do, so the ACA accreditation seal in the camp’s brochure saves you a lot of time.  If the camp is not ACA-accredited, you’ll have to rely exclusively on its record and reputation.  If you have extra time, you can also talk with the camp’s director about his or her own standards for health, safety, staff training, and program quality.
3. If the camp passed its ACA inspection, then you can be certain it met or exceeded rigorous health, safety, staff-training, and program standards on the day it was inspected.  Later that summer, or maybe two summers down the road, the camp could look quite different.  The director may have changed, all the former staff may be gone, and the equipment could have taken a beating.  ACA inspections happen once every three years.  You want a camp that upholds its own high standards all the time.
4. No form of accreditation can prevent accidents.  Things can and do go wrong at camps (and homes and schools) every year.  Despite high standards, people make mistakes and equipment sometimes fails.  Natural disasters occasionally occur.  Kids get hurt from time to time.
5. ACA accreditation does not guarantee that your child will like the camp.  Nothing can do that.
6. Camp = People.  As we emphasized in Chapter 1, camp is mostly about the people, not the facilities.  No kind of accreditation will guarantee that the staff of the camp is skilled with children.  As a close camp friend involved in leadership development once remarked, “Great cabin leaders could take a bunch of kids, put them in an empty parking lot, and turn it into a great camp.”

What certifications do instructors and cabin leaders have? 

• Instructor Certification.  Head instructors should be qualified to teach their program area.  Whereas teaching experience is necessary for all program areas, official certifications are a must in risky or technical programs.  For example, the mini-golf instructor should have experience teaching her program, but she doesn’t need a certification in mini-golf, because it’s not a risky or technical program.  However, swimming instructors and lifeguards should be both experienced and certified because activities in the water are potentially risky.  Do the camps you’re considering have experienced and certified people in key programs?
• First Aid / CPR Certification.  Both cabin leaders and instructors should be certified in basic first aid and CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation).  Accidents do happen at camp and children may get hurt, despite the best efforts of experienced staffs.  Has the camp trained their staff in first aid and CPR before the campers’ arrival?
• Qualifications and Safety Record.  ACA-accreditation is a quick way to verify that a camp staff had the necessary qualifications.  If the camp is not accredited, you yourself need to check the camp’s safety record and staff qualifications.  If the camp has a shaky reputation, a poor safety record, or an untrained staff, look elsewhere.

How skilled are the cabin leaders? 

• Experience.  The best cabin leaders are those with overnight camp experience.  Their age is less important than how long they’ve been working with children.  Most important, how long have the cabin leaders been working at that particular camp?  At the highest quality camps, the cabin leaders return for many seasons in a row.  What percentage of the staff is returning from last year?  Anything above 50% suggests a particularly strong camp.  Anything above 75% staff return is extraordinary.
• Training.  Before the campers arrive, all cabin leaders should receive in-service training in important areas, such as safety, leadership, discipline, program activities, and managing emotional and behavioral problems.  What sort of training does the camp give its cabin leaders?  Do they spend the pre-camp training week doing only hard labor to set up camp, or do they work to develop their skills with children?
• Hiring and Promotion.  The manner in which cabin leaders are hired and promoted will tell you something about the camp’s quality.  Some camps advertise and recruit on college campuses, the Internet, and various places where young adults gather.  Other camps have an internal promotion system whereby mature campers with leadership potential are invited to return as leaders-in-training.  Both methods can yield high-quality cabin leaders.  However, camp directors who use an internal promotion system really know the people they are hiring.  At such camps, there tend to be fewer “wild-card” leaders who turn out to be poorly suited for the job.  Where does the camp get its cabin leaders and instructors?  What sort of interview and evaluation did they complete?  How many were promoted from last year?
• International Staff.  International staff add flair and diversity to any camp.  At foreign-language camps, they make especially wonderful contributions.  At all other camps, it’s critical that cabin leaders from other countries speak English (or whatever the primary language of the campers happens to be). Some camps boast about the international diversity of their staff.  However, we’ve had kids tell us that, at their previous camp, their cabin leader didn’t speak more than a few words of English.  Not only is that annoying, there’s also no way that a cabin leader can do her best if she doesn’t speak the language of her campers.  Does the camp hire international cabin leaders?  (More than 50% do.)  Are they fluent in your child’s native language?  If not, you probably want to choose a different camp.
• Camper-to-Leader Ratio.  Many camps advertise their camper-to-leader ratio.  For example, the camp brochure may boast an “8:1 camper-to-leader ratio.”  The true ratio is important, because the heart of the camping experience is the interaction between a cabin leader and his campers.  If he is responsible for 20 children, each will individually spend just a few minutes a day with him.  However, if the same cabin leader is responsible for only 9 children, then each child gets more attention. A problem lies in the way some camps calculate their camper-to-leader ratio.  It’s not valid to include the medical staff, maintenance staff, kitchen staff, and laundry staff in the calculation of this ratio.  Such camps may say that they have a 5:1 camper-to-leader ratio, but each cabin actually has 14 campers and one leader.  To find out the true ratio, learn how many children and how many leaders are in each cabin each day. A ratio between 4:1 and 10:1 is acceptable, with 6:1 being the national average.  Also, check the daily camp schedule to see how much time cabin leaders actually spend with their campers.  Will your child receive enough individual attention?
• Health Center.  With luck, your child won’t have to visit the camp’s health center or infirmary more than once (on opening day).  Still, you should see the health center and meet one of the staff, especially if your child has some specific medical concerns.  The staff should be licensed to provide medical care to children, and the health center itself should be neat, clean, and well-stocked. Ask whether the medical staff lives at the camp or just comes in during their shifts.  Our bias is that staff who live on-site have a better understanding of camp life and of the campers, which enables them to provide better care.  If the camp has its own registered nurse (RN) or doctor (MD), does she live on-site, or is she just on-call?  The farther a camp is from a hospital, the more important it becomes to have highly skilled medical staff who live at the camp.

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