Now, during the off-season, is the best time to take a long, hard look at your day camps.
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Like most park districts, the Park District of Oak Park operates a day camp program in the summer and reviews its success during the off-season. By all indications, Oak Park had a very good one. The program grew each year. New types and locations were added on a regular basis. Surveys at the end of each season mostly were positive. Then, during the summer of 1997, a minor incident at one of the locations caused the park board and staff to take an even closer look. Were we really doing the best we could?
In the process of reviewing current procedures for monitoring attendance, dismissal of campers, how campers were moved from site to site, etcetera, the question was raised: How can you tell if you are doing a good job? The staff was asked if there were any standards available which objectively would measure the quality of our day camp program.
Staff learned that the American Camping Association (ACA) offers an accreditation process for all types of camps, including day camps. The district purchased a Standards Book and reviewed the requirements. After several phone conversations with Gordie Kaplan, executive director of the Illinois Section of the ACA, the park board and the staff decided that the accreditation process was something that should be done.
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A meeting in December of 1997 began a very beneficial seven-month project for the Park District of Oak Park, and one that you should consider for your agency's day camps. Now, during the off-season, is the best time to take a long, hard look at your day camps.
Attending the first meeting were Gordie Kaplan and district staff including: Jim Doss, superintendent of revenue facilities; JoAn Zimmermann, recreation program manager; and Greg Evans, manager of lighted schoolhouse. Our goal was to achieve day camp accreditation during the summer of 1998.
Kaplan was a patient educator as we discussed how the program worked, and what steps we would need to follow in order to meet our goal. In order to start the process, one person from the park district needed to join ACA to be a "member of record" and the agency needed to pay a service fee based on the camp operating budget. Kaplan then walked us through the entire Standards Book to show us what specifically had to be demonstrated for each standard.
This process is called a "Standards Course" and all camps wishing to be accredited are required to attend one. These courses are conducted by ACA usually in the spring of each year and are free to those camps seeking accreditation. We requested to have the Standards Course in December so that we would have adequate time to prepare the required materials and make the required changes in time for summer The accreditation process would force us to look at camps in a whole new way. The staff thought about and discussed issues involving camps that either had not been addressed in the past or had been discussed but not documented
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