A Long, Hard Trek to Camp

The pros get started in September, going online, collecting brochures, filling next year’s calendar with deadlines and cutoff dates, carving up the blank and blissful weeks of summer with pencils and colored markers.

The neophytes with a clue might start looking in January, but if they don’t heed the advice of their elders -- fill out the applications now; don’t mail them, hand-deliver them; take whatever crumbs are offered even if it isn’t what you want -- they may find themselves getting The Call: “I regret to say we won’t be able to offer Danny or Susie or Jenna a place at [fill in the blank] summer camp.”

“I felt like she had been rejected from college,” said Suzann Papagoda, a downtown attorney who got The Call from Altadena-based Tom Sawyer Camps in early March. “Rejected from summer camp -- I couldn’t believe it.”

Not that she hadn’t been warned. When other mothers at her daughter’s tennis class heard that she still had the application form two weeks after receiving it in late January, they gasped collectively before telling her to fill it out and drive it to the camp office. That day. “Like I should yank Bailey out of class and get to it,” she said.

But she didn’t heed their warnings, and she was offered only Tuesday and Thursday sessions at Tom Sawyer’s Altadena site, which does not send out a bus for pickup. “The other mothers told me to take anything because then I would be a returning parent [next year] and get to send in my application a month earlier,” she said. “But I guess I don’t want it badly enough.”

Instead, she opted to send her 6-year-old daughter to the summer program at her local Y. Not that that was simple either. Camp sign-up day at the Crescenta/Canada YMCA was March 20; the office opened at 9 a.m. Papagoda planned to get there at 8:30 to beat the crowd. At a little before 7 a.m., she got a call from another mother, reporting that the line was around the block. There were camp chairs, newspapers and John Grisham novels. There were thermoses of coffee and folks in flannel and polar fleece, all the hallmarks of people who had been there since the crack of dawn -- which some of them had.

“Some of our parents were there at 5:30,” said Robin McCarthy, the Y’s marketing director. While most of the day camps still had spaces available at the end of the day, the two sleep-away camps were almost full.

“For working parents,” McCarthy added, “summer camp has become a necessity.”

For many American parents these days, summer is not a time of slowing down while watching their kids lounge around the community pool. Instead, June, July and August create the Grand Canyon of child care -- a formidable chasm waiting to be spanned.

In the modern world of the two-income household, organizing child care during the school year can be difficult enough. Then comes summer, and all the best-laid plans are up for grabs -- the kids want to be with their friends, they want to ride horses, they want to learn science, they want to avoid being on the same planet as their sister. And who is going to watch over them? So, parents find themselves spending the early weeks of the new year not preparing the tax returns or paying off the holiday bills, but researching, applying to and budgeting for summer camps, which can cost up to $100 a day per child.

Not surprisingly, the summer camp industry has grown in the last five years, becoming larger and more specialized. But this coast still does not have the other coast’s tradition of shipping kids off to the mountains for eight weeks at a clip. Instead, there are day camps in a tantalizing array -- from aqua camp at the beach to Camp Dino at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County to performing arts camp at Descanso Gardens in La Canada. But many last a week or two weeks, while others are only half a day; some provide, for an additional fee, aftercare; others do not. Which means parents must stitch together a quilt of many programs large enough to cover two or three months.

Meanwhile, the application process for both private and public camps has become increasingly competitive, in an elite boarding school sort of way. Only there are no test scores involved -- just timing and parental strategy.

Established programs with four- and six-week sessions, such as Tom Sawyer and Summerkids in Altadena, become family traditions, as guarded and coveted as a box at the Hollywood Bowl. Summerkids has no listed phone number and cannot be Googled; the information is dispersed exclusively by word of mouth. Both camps are close to full by mid-March; at Tom Sawyer, the programs for first-grade boys have been filled entirely by returning families and veterans (former counselors or families who perhaps have skipped a year or two) before new families could be considered.

Marjan Khazra had heard from a friend how competitive Tom Sawyer was, so she got on the mailing list last fall and enrolled her 4-year-old son in their preschool camp program this year.

“The application came at 3 o’clock on Monday,” she said. “I filled it out, put the kids in the car and was handing it in by 5.”

Even so, she only got Tuesdays and Thursdays, which she took. “My son is already enrolled in the summer program at his preschool full time, so essentially I’m double-paying this year so I won’t have to worry next year.”

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Waiting in line is the easy part.

As Karen Gee-McAuley, senior vice president of a public relations firm, stood in line at the Crescenta/Canada YMCA, she fought down panic. As with Papagoda, this was her Plan B. Or actually Plan C. Last year, her 6-year old daughter, Grace, went to day camp at the Los Angeles Zoo and loved it. That was the plan for this summer too -- as much zoo camp as they could get. But because of a city hiring freeze, zoo officials have not been able to say when their summer camp will begin or if it will even happen.

When the zoo’s normal deadline of March 15 came and went, “I completely freaked out,” said Gee-McAuley, who lives in La Canada. “Grace was so disappointed, and I had no idea what I’m going to do.”

She applied to Summerkids but got The Call -- she wanted Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; the camp could offer her Tuesdays and Thursdays. She took it, which meant a round of calls to mothers of Grace’s friends who were trying to keep the girls together during the summer. Gee-McAuley filled in Mondays and Wednesdays at the Y. All this also had to accommodate a family trip in July.

“Until last year,” she said, “I never knew what an ordeal it could be to figure out your summer. What kind of culture is this that we have to plan summer camp six months in advance?”

A culture that is working harder and becoming more particular. Tom Sawyer is popular because of its low-tech focus on old-fashioned camp traditions, combined with high-end amenities -- there are horses and door-to-door van service.

“We don’t want it to be an anxious sort of feeling,” said program director Melody Campbell. “Some parents say it’s harder to get in than kindergarten. And we do have parents who want their children in so badly that they are,” she paused diplomatically, “not happy when we can’t accommodate them.” She adds that being put on the waiting list does not mean a child won’t get in. “We take hundreds of kids off the list each summer,” she said.

Parents who can afford it will pay extra just not to have to worry. At Tumbleweed Day Camp in Brentwood, some returning parents will automatically book the entire summer and then figure out which sessions they actually want. Tumbleweed’s executive director, John Beitner, says the whole application process has become increasingly fraught as more and more parents feel the pressure to lock in their first-choice camp.

“It’s part of an overall pressure on parents, to get the right preschool so you get the right kindergarten so you get the right college,” he says. “And it is probably related to the whole over-scheduling of kids in general.”

Early enrollment for returning families ends March 15 at Tumbleweed, at which time the camp is usually half-full. Within a week or so, the camp is “pretty full,” Beitner says, “though there are always slots here and there. People call us in June, and sometimes we can fit them in if they are flexible.”

But flexibility is a luxury in child care. At Tumbleweed, Beitner said, many of the campers also have nannies, which is not the case for the majority of families. So the less-expensive programs at YMCAs and recreation centers around L.A. find their programs booked just as fast as the high-end camps.

At the Cheviot Hills Recreation Center, the staff mails out schedules in March. Walk-in registration day is April 17, but staff will take mailed-in applications on April 5. Several years ago, things got a bit out of hand, so there now are rules: no faxes, no FedEx, no walk-ins and no postmarks earlier than that date.

“We want to give everyone an equal chance,” said rec assistant Kyle Roberts. The big sessions are filled by early May, he said, although a local parent characterized it as “more like 15 minutes.”

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For some, summer camp has to fill in the blanks between family trips, which makes scheduling even more complicated.

“I have layers of schedules to accommodate,” said Christine Holmquist, an interior designer who lives in La Crescenta. “My work, my husband’s work, a reunion, our summer trip, now this.”

She found the camp she wanted for her 6-year-old daughter. When she was told that the three-day program was full but that she could have the full week, she took it. Her 4-year-old son is happy in his year-round preschool. But she still has at least a week to fill after the family trip is over, and maybe more. The Glendale Unified School District has yet to release its 2004-05 calendar; there is debate over whether a week should be taken from summer vacation and given to winter break to accommodate the Armenian Christmas holiday, which falls in January.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” Holmquist said. “I feel like maybe there should be some academics in there, to get them in the school mode.”

According to parents of older kids, the early years are easy. Kendis Marcotte, a Pasadena financial and organizational consultant, is a summer-camp pro. She has three children, ages 10 through 16. “I start thinking about it as soon as school starts,” she says. “Every year, they outgrow some program, and it’s a constant challenge to find new interests.”

Slowly but surely, the summer camp industry is expanding to meet the need in both number and diversity. According to Jeffrey Solomon, executive director of the National Camp Assn. in New York, there are 650 to 700 summer camps in California, and 75% of them -- half day camps, half sleepover -- are in the southern part of the state. The number of camps nationwide has grown about 22% in the last five years, he says, and much of that increase is due to the needs of the two-income family.

Sleep-away camps make up much of that growth, Solomon says, “because as more and more families work irregular hours, and Grandma is no longer right down the street, the days of leaving kids at home are over, and even a camp that runs from 8 to 4 or 8 to 5 doesn’t work.”

Both sleep-away and day camps are becoming more specialized -- there are art camps and Shakespeare camps, science camps and business camps. “The trend now is toward enrichment,” Solomon said. “Not just ‘I want my kid to play tennis,’ but ‘I want my kid to learn how to play tennis better.’ ”

Part of that, as Tumbleweeds’ Beitner says, is a trend toward fast-tracking kids, but it’s also a response to the cost -- and difficulty -- of getting the kids in. “You spend all this time -- time you don’t have -- researching and applying, and then you spend a lot of money, so you want something to show for it,” said Solomon. “That’s only natural.”

Working mothers -- and overwhelmingly it’s the mothers who wrangle summer camp -- also bring a different mind-set to the procedure than their own stay-at-home mothers did. Twenty years ago, if a California kid went to camp, it was a traditional Scout or Native American-themed affair, and it was part of a summer so loose there was no need for scheduling. “I never left the neighborhood,” said Marcotte, laughing at the difference between her experience and that of her children. “But well-educated modern mothers are anal; we want our kids to experience what’s out there.”

Watching her 5-year-old daughter try a backhand shot and listening to Papagoda and Khazra commiserate about Tom Sawyer, Linda Nessen laughed nervously. Her daughter is happy in her preschool summer program this year, but Nessen knows her camp-free days are numbered.

“Get on the mailing list now,” Khazra advises.

“I had no idea,” Nessen said, “until I heard people talking.”

Solomon thinks parents should stay calm and not get fixated on getting into that one great camp or creating the dream package of programs. “Parents put so much pressure on themselves to pack it all in one summer to provide this ‘perfect’ experience. They need to remember, there are other years ahead.”

And for those years, the application forms were due three weeks ago.