Summer camp on Long Island: What you need to know this season

The issues facing summer camps this year due to COVID-19 run from "big picture" easing of virus protocols to collateral challenges frustrating all industries, such as supply chain delays and hiring woes, according to camp officials who participated in a Newsday Live Webinar, "Summer Camps: What You Need To Know."

Camper enrollment has been "pretty exceptional" and "incredibly robust," camp directors said. "I have not seen as much enthusiasm from families to join the camping experience in probably all my years of camping," said Mark Transport, owner/director of Crestwood Day Camp in Melville.

The directors said they expect most camps to run at full capacity — as long as they can hire enough staff. "Like every other industry, staffing is an issue, to find qualified, good people," Transport said. He extolled the value of being a camp counselor and also urged parents to register for camp as early as possible in case camps have to curtail enrollment because of staff shortages.

Supply chain is also a challenge. "I have all of my plates, cups … gloves, all of that stuff for my food service, just in case, already stocked away for this summer, not something I would have typically done previously," said Will Pierce, owner/director of Pierce Country Day Camp in Roslyn and president of the Long Island Camps and Private Schools Association.

As far as daily camp life, the directors said they expect to be able to ease restrictions.

"Certainly, things look different this year than last year based on the age groups to which kids can be vaccinated and also the amount of natural immunity that our particular communities are experiencing," said Mark Newfield, owner of Iroquois Springs Camp in the Catskills.

"We expect that this summer, excitingly enough, probably — knock wood — will be very much like 2019, where not only everything is normal both outside and inside, but we can get back to a whole mess of special events, color wars, competitions between different groups," Transport said.

The day camp directors said they expect less focus on blanket testing, won’t impose mandates for campers and staff to be vaccinated or masked, and won’t need limitations on bus capacity, which for camps is generally under the maximum number of allowed children anyway.

The officials said they are not specifically worried about the emerging omicron subvariant BA.2. The camps faced the delta variant surge last summer and "fared exceptionally well," Pierce said. Camps have the advantage of being 95% outdoors, the directors said.

"[We’re] a lot less concerned than we have been each time there’s a new variant … this isn’t our first rodeo or even our second rodeo," said Pierce, alluding to the pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021. "We’ve done it already; we’re really very prepared for it."

By Beth Whitehouse

Special to NewsdayBethWhitehouse1

Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.