Parents enroll children for entire summer as alternative to day care The baby sitter is a lovely girl, but she charges $14 an hour and her boyfriend’s sneaking in after you leave for work.
Day care centers don’t come cheap, either. But with the kids on summer vacation and no three-month break from the 9-5 job, what’s a parent to do?
Enter summer camp, where registration is soaring and parents are scrambling to sign up their kids in the final days before most camps kick off on Monday.
| Who takes care of the kids? |
| Average price per hour for … |
| A baby sitter, over 22, with 5 years experience, in ZIP code 20005: $14 |
| A D.C. day care for a 4-year-old, adjusted off annual rate: $4.34 |
| A D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation summer camp: $1.33 |
| Sources: D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation, National Association of Child Care Resources & Referral Agencies, BabyCenter.com |
Last year, District-run camps hit 75 percent capacity by the end of summer. This year, they’re already close to 85 percent, with almost all the camps in Wards 1, 2, 3 and 4 full with kids kicking a ball around, painting murals and re-enacting Shakespeare.
The demand is so big that the city scrapped its waiting lists for the two-week, $100 sessions, saying they were getting “unwieldy.”
“There’s a rash of people, now that the kids are out. Parents are like, ‘Oh hey, summer camp,’ ” said John Stokes, spokesman for the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation. “We’ve been barraged in the last couple of days.”
And parents aren’t signing up their kids for just one or two weeks as a treat away from the TV or the pool, as they did 30 years ago: They’re springing for multiple sessions, often sending them the entire summer.
Doc Daniels, who lives in the Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast, said he is sending his 6-year-old son, D.J., to a basketball camp and general summer camp at Howard University. Together, they will last the entire summer.
Cost was a factor in deciding to send his son to camp, he said. His 1-year-old daughter, Amire, attends day care.
“For a whole summer camp, it’s cheaper. One month of day care for my daughter is more expensive than a whole summer of summer camp for my son. Summer camp would always be better, but for infants, you don’t have a choice.”
Tony Brown waited too long to enroll his two kids in D.C. summer camps, and the programs they wanted filled up. “School’s over, but there’s other things for them to learn than TV and the playground,” said Brown, whose kids likely will remain home this summer.
Narazareth Hernandez said she takes advantage of extended morning and afternoon hours at a Columbia Heights summer camp where her 5-year-old daughter is excited to sing and dance.
“Because I work, nobody can take her,” Hernandez said. “There she can learn everything.”
Morning and aftercare were so popular with working parents in Montgomery County that the camps lumped them into their normal daily schedule — the camps run 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. now instead of 9 a.m. to about 4:30 p.m.
“Most of our ‘summer fun centers’ at this point have waiting lists,” said Gabriel Albornoz, director of the county’s recreation department.
Parents also pay Montgomery to give their young teens jobs: For $100, the county will let kids ages 12 to 15 be “counselors in training.”
In Prince George’s County, nature and art camps are popular, there’s even a camp where kids make a musical. Early registrations were down slightly from 2010, but eked up in May and June.
Fairfax County-run camp registrations are already up 2,000 kids over last year. Usually about 6,000 kids make up 20,000 registrations, meaning they’re signing on for multiple sessions of chess-playing, hoop-shooting and general fun-having.
“I get these calls every day, people panicking,” said Ellen Werthmann, the Fairfax County Parks Authority’s youth program specialist. “One lady told me she had a color-coded spreadsheet sitting in front of her, with different colors for each of her three kids.”
Intern Amy Myers contributed to this report.
