Summer camp, childcare programs adapt to COVID-19

The Ithaca Children’s Garden, with a long tradition of helping kids and families connect to nature, was hit hard by the pandemic.

“I remember that weird period where we had no idea how long it was going to last,” said Alana Pagano, communications coordinator. “And then I just felt like, at some point, things just shifted. And it became clear that this was going to be around for a very long time.”

The garden had to shut down for safety reasons, only recently reopening on a limited business. But another favorite of the garden – its many summer programs – have been canceled for the season.

“It just ultimately came down to us not having the resources to ensure that we could keep camp and camp staff safe,” Pagano said.

The garden isn’t the only organization struggling to provide the childcare and summer camp programs parents need. The economic and societal impacts of the pandemic have driven up demand for childcare and summer camps even more than before while making it more difficult to provide these services.

COVID-19 really started to affect childcare starting in mid-March, when County Administrator Jason Molino signed an executive order requiring all licensed childcare facilities in Tompkins County to close for about a month. In response to this order, the Child Development Council (CDC) established a plan to accommodate the childcare needs of essential personnel, including reopening two daycare centers and reducing class sizes.

On June 12, the state announced that overnight camps were prohibited for the summer of 2020, citing greater difficulties in ensuring participants’ health and safety than day camps. Day camps, however, would be allowed to resume at the end of June, so long as they follow safety guidelines like ensuring six-foot separations, using smaller group sizes and others.

“The childcare and the summer camp programs that exist are taking many safety measures, which is a good thing, and we’re helping the programs to understand that and comply with that,” said Molly McGriff, childcare resource and referral director for the CDC.

The Summer Youth Planning Task Force, a coalition of over 20 county agencies, also has worked to “share resources and collaborate to brainstorm creative programming for the summer that meets safety recommendations,” according to Molino.

Director of the Tompkins County Youth Services Department Kate Shanks-Booth explained some of the reasoning behind the task force.

“The camps are looking at possibly shifting hours of operation, days of operation, and if a COVID-19 case popped up, then they would have to shut everything down again,” she said. “So, we’re just trying to be flexible and figure out how to support those people.”

Sources interviewed for this story outlined several main challenges facing camp, program and childcare providers because of COVID-19, including lack of preparation time, finances and meeting the safety requirements.

McGriff said that the guidelines on holding camps and programs came out too late for many centers to adjust in time.

“The Department of Health guidelines for childcare and summer camp only came out June 8,” she said. “So, right now, if you wanted to open a summer camp program, we have the guidelines for what you need to adhere to, and we know what they are, but most of the programs needed to be planning before June 8 for the summer.”

Shanks-Booth said that meeting those guidelines, while a challenge in itself, is also costly.

“There were a lot of camps that really had to contort themselves to make it possible to be able to meet all the health requirements,” she said. “They operate on such a small profit margin as it is. The additional cost for those health and safety things, which are good and you want them, just really made it cost-prohibitive.”

The Ithaca YMCA knows this struggle first hand, as CEO Frank Towner explained. After the Y had to close in the initial round of shutdowns, it suffered huge loss to revenue collected through membership fees.

“We need to provide a program that creates some income to keep our Y running,” Towner said. “Fundraising is not going to get us out of this. If we’re closed for another two months, that’s not good.”

That, combined with other economic factors, means that even bringing back staff is a difficult task.

This is why many providers struggle to even meet the requirements needed to hold programs and camps, as Kath Fenzel, associate director of athletics at Cornell University, explained.

Cornell early on canceled overnight camps for the summer but was able to meet requirements to still hold many of its summer programs, including the Cornell University Big Red Sports (CUBS) Camp. But for other providers with fewer resources, shutting down was the only viable option.

“I absolutely don’t fault anybody in the area who just can’t take it on this year because it is a lot,” Fenzel said. “It is a lot of boxes checked, and ultimately, [we’re] almost solely responsible for the safety and wellbeing of every camper that comes through our doors.”

The Ithaca Children’s Garden, as alluded to earlier, was one such organization that had to shut down its programs, and Pagano said she’s uncertain whether the garden will be able to hold its programming in the future.

“We are concerned about what is to come, and especially in the fall, we’ve had a lot of families who are still really interested, and we’re planning on holding our fall programming,” she said. “But I think we’re concerned that the landscape will have changed too much and it won’t really be feasible to run programming.”

All of these factors affecting providers ripples out and creates more challenges for parents who need care as they go back to work. As county Legislator Anna Kelles explained, the coronavirus worsened an already-existing problem.

“We were having access problems coming into this pandemic because we don’t have enough childcare and the childcare that we have is not affordable for a lot of people,” she said. “And now, you have all of these parents, many of them can’t go back to work [because] they don’t have childcare.”

And for those who are able to get childcare or get their kid into summer programming, there is still the concern about how the experience will be for the kids involved.

“Will it be fun?” Shanks-Booth said. “That’s the other thing if you send your kid and they are required to stay with the same 10 or 15 kids in a room and they’re not allowed to take field trips, they’re not allowed to eat lunch with other people, they can’t mingle.”

Sources agreed that it is imperative to discuss this issue now because reopening will only continue to create financial hardships for families facing childcare needs. And on a grand scale, sources agreed that economic recovery cannot happen without childcare.

“Not only is supporting childcare vital to the wellbeing and health of children; the economy won’t be able to reopen fully until we have safe and reliable childcare,” said Erin Marteal, executive director of the Ithaca Children’s Garden.

By far, sources said the most important thing childcare and summer camp providers need right now is financial resources. As Tompkins County Chamber of President Jennifer Tavares explained, childcare providers are businesses operating on small budgets and need more funds to be able to survive through the pandemic and provide needed care.

“Whether they’re nonprofit or for-profit, running a childcare operation, or even a summer camp operation, is another type of business,” she said. “And those entities will need support and investment and access to capital just like any other business that’s struggling right now.”

Most sources acknowledged that much of that support will have to come from local, state or national government. And to that end, the county Legislature unanimously passed a resolution at its June 16 meeting calling on New York state to release $222 million in available funds for childcare and after school programs.

“We have to recognize that childcare is an economic development issue; we cannot reopen our economy without it,” Kelles said at the meeting.

Beyond that, others suggested another beneficial move is for employers and their workforce to work together to make it as easy as possible for parents to get the care they need for their children, as many already have done.

“I hope that employers if they have the luxury of making remote work available to their employees, particularly those that are dealing with these childcare issues … that they continue to be flexible with their team and find ways to be creative about scheduling and how different folks within their workforce might be able to share responsibilities differently,” Tavares said.

For now, most sources are trying to best adapt to the circumstances, and many are trying to stay positive along the way.

“We are totally hopeful that because of the support of staff, our directors, our trustees, that we are going to be able to come back strong,” Towner said. “It’s going to take a lot of fortitude to strengthen this out as we go along. Those first couple months are awful. Come back strong.”

Fenzel expressed a similar optimism.

“I sure would like to get back to having 11 weeks of summer programming and all kinds of sports and thousands of kids, and I know we’ll return to that at some point,” she said. “It definitely won’t be this summer. But my hope is that we can all get through the next few months helping each other until it seems like we’re back to what was our normal.”

State requirements and guidelines are available at governor.ny.gov. The county’s searchable guide for summer camps in the area can be found at tompkinscountyny.gov/youth/summercamps. Visit the county’s Youth Services page (tompkinscountyny.gov/youth/links) for additional resources.

For more information about the larger challenges facing childcare in the county, visit Tompkins Weekly’s last article on this subject at tompkinsweekly.com/stories/county-grapples-with-lack-of-affordable-childcare, 3192.