What We Are Doing to Prepare for our Smile campers

June 5, 2020

By: Darlene Conway

As our SMILE summer camp team members and I prepare ourselves for the arrival of our campers, we continue to brainstorm about new ideas, activities and processes to make this the safest and  healthiest environment where our campers can laugh and have fun with their friends and counselors and not have any worries in their minds.  We continue to communicate with our camp parents as well our thoughts and our ideas via facebook Live, blog posts, and emails.  Last week, Thomas and I emailed our Contagious Illness Prevention Plan, Mitigation Strategies Plan and provided links to our updated Health History Forms and the CDC recommended guidelines for summer camps.  These are documents that provide camp parents with our prevention and mitigation process for our SMILE campers and team members.

We have purchased masks (cloth ones so they look less medical) for our SMILE team members (as of right now the CDC is not recommending that campers wear masks) and PPE (face shields, gowns, gloves, masks) to be used by Thomas and myself if there is a suspected case of contagious illness.  These are required by the state and the CDC as well as the ACA (American Camp Association).  We outlined the process for handling a possible contagious illness case in our Contagious Illness Prevention Plan.

In addition, it is recommended that ALL food preparation be done while wearing gloves ( of course) as well as disposable gowns.  Thomas  and I have made the choice to use disposable aprons to take the “medical feel” out of the picture for our SMILE campers and team members.

We have also purchased clear plastic backpacks for each of our 6 groups to ensure that we can disinfect them. We have purchased 2 outdoor tents to shield our campers from the sun if it gets too hot if the recommendation is to have longer periods of time outside for summer camps.  

We will also be adding an outside hand-washing station for campers to wash their hands as well as adding hand sanitizing wipes in each counselor’s backpack to avoid the constant use of a hand pump sanitizer which could spread germs.  

Coming soon, our campers will be able to pick up their own personal arts and crafts container to be used for the entire duration of their time enrolled this summer in  SMILE.  These containers will allow each camper to have their own place to store their art supplies and will be sanitized before and after each campers’ use by our SMILE team members.  I will be providing more information on how those containers can be picked up in the coming weeks.

In addition to the individual art containers we will provide, we will also purchase enough craft supplies so that each camper can work independently to create their own work of art or create a small part of a bigger group project.

These are just a few of the steps we are taking to provide our parents with the security of knowing that we are doing everything we can to create a safe and healthy environment for their child to grow, make new friends, have fun, and create memories that will last a lifetime.  We will continue to brainstorm new ideas and activities throughout the upcoming weeks and into our SMILE season so that we can keep our SMILE campers actively engaged and we will continue to communicate with SMILE parents about our ongoing efforts to make this a summer to remember for all of the right reasons.