Frederick Melo: The battle for the soul of America starts with summer camp registration
Melo #Melo
There is a battle for the soul of America, gosh darn it, and it’s being waged online, around summer camp registration. For example, my best friend the Internet tells me that the University of Minnesota offers popular and intriguing camps for tots — “Raptor Bio-mimickry” and “Beginner Coding: Pokemon Adventures” jump out on paper — but the online registry began at 6 a.m. on Feb. 13, a frigid winter’s morning/mourning.
For all intents and purposes, registration closed for parents of the very young a picosecond later, by which time all the choice cuts had been gobbled up by moms, dads and other vultures. My competitors know who they are.
If you hesitate to brave the digital cold, even by half an hour, your top picks are gone.
That’s right — a parent logging in at 6:30 a.m. in mid-February to set their kids’ schedule for June, July or August is a lazy parent indeed. A failure. A fetid shame hovering above their wife and children. A rejected soldier on the battlefield of life. You snoozed and lost — and yes, that’s my own inner voice speaking to me, bawling even, just like it did last year when camp registrations began opening across the metro, popping up like pricey, tragic whack-a-mole.
Both of my children are suddenly, as if by magic, old enough for camps oriented toward grades 1-3, arguably the most competitive and least forgiving of all registrations. How late to life are we? Snapology in Minneapolis began taking sign-ups for its Lego camps on Dec. 11.
That’s nothing, honey, says the Internet. “We signed up kid for a Y camp in NOVEMBER, on the day registration opened, and AN HOUR after registration opened, our top choice filled,” Tweets a mom my way. “This is nuts.”
Well said.
The glory and pain of summer camp spreadsheets
What’s the beauty of a membership to the Science Museum of Minnesota, beyond free year-round entry to exhibits, the downtown St. Paul Omnitheater and a discount on parking? It’s access, six days early, to camp registration, a benefit that has been clearly lost on me two years in a row while I fumble with a spreadsheet designed to predict my children’s activities, week by week, sometimes hour by hour, some six months or more in advance.
Concerned camp mothers on the internet (and yes, there are many) tell me what my spreadsheet is lacking. I haven’t just failed to predict the ideal summer camps by early January, if not earlier, but I’ve failed to list dates and times when each registration opens.
These days, leading up to the moment of truth, there’s sometimes a virtual lobby, an online waiting room where competing prospective registrants co-exist in a digital limbo, hoping to be accepted among the chosen. Let me repeat: There are online $%x#^! waiting rooms. You see, there are armies of us, perched over a computer mouse well before 6 a.m., waiting to click-click-click-click-click…
Don’t get me started on the cost. A single week of Lego robotics can set a bleary-eyed dad back as much as $600, and yes, that’s just day camp. Now multiply that price by two, as in two tiny tots. There are up to 12 weeks of summer. You do the math. The registration page has the gall to ask if you’d like to add lunch, at additional cost, and leave a tip.
A silver lining for some of us: Keep in mind that day camps, even those organized around a sport or specific activity, qualify as day care, which is tax deductible. Overnight camps do not qualify, and are not tax deductible.
Affordable offerings — if you camp-hunt
It’s times like these I’m especially grateful for municipal Parks and Rec offerings, which are priced for us plebians. (St. Paul Parks and Rec summer registration opens April 3, and I tell you this with teeth gritted, as if giving away a passcode to online treasure.)
I’m also grateful for those camps that offer relatively affordable half-day programs, monthly payment options, scholarships or sliding scale “pay what you can” fees.
See the YMCA of the North and the YWCA, for starters, but don’t sleep on sign-ups. The St. Paul Public Schools have opened registration for free summer learning programs, as well as adult and youth “Community Education” offerings. The latter features a treasure trove of affordable youth activities, with free to low-cost options for students on free or reduced lunch.
Also in St. Paul, the Park Square Theatre — which recently merged with the Steppingstone Theatre — offers the “Pay As You’re Able” option to lower the price of a week of full-day performance prep for your cherub, currently $430, to something more manageable — or to raise it to help cover the next person’s burden.
Are the camps popular? Some Park Square camps sell out within 48 hours, the impetus for a pre-payment program, wherein gift card holders this year were allowed to register for camp as early as Jan. 9. Sales of those gift cards closed Dec. 22.
To navigate this battlefield, it helps to dream outside the box. The American Swedish Institute doesn’t open its summer camp registrations until late March. Could my kids be a pinch Swede? Holler! (Or should I say, “halla!”?) Google “summer camps Minnesota” or “summer camps Twin Cities” and you’ll find some helpful camp directories, such as those run by TwinCitiesmom.com and Family Fun Twin Cities.
Among the links there, the Ramsey County Historical Society, which offers camps at Gibbs Farm, and the Maplewood Area Historical Society, which does the same at Bruentrup Heritage Farm, both had attractive openings, last I checked.
That means for $150, you can still practice bows and arrows, learn the engineering of the tipi and engage with the Dakota language for a week of half-day learning at the Gibbs Farm “Dakota Camp,” but a Victorian tea party is now out of reach in August — the second session of “Life of a Gibbs Girl” is already sold out.
My kids know from experience that the Sanneh Foundation offers a couple hours of soccer games in a fun, camp-like setting in three-day and four-day increments throughout the summer, and they’re free, amazingly enough. Your local church and other nonprofits — St. Paul Urban Tennis comes to mind — may host low-cost programs of their own.
My advice would be to stay curious and open to trying something new, from fencing camp at the Center for Blade Arts in Minneapolis to Twin Cities Trapeze camp in St. Paul. If a discipline exists, assume there’s a summer camp for it, and hopefully a scholarship as well. The Youth Performance Company in St. Paul offers half-day movement classes like “Disney Dance Party,” which appears to boil down to wiggling to Disney songs. For that, I’d trade places with my kids in a heartbeat.
And of course, start early. Ramsey County’s Tamarack Nature Center offers some attractive programs for kids 3-14, with prices for some half-day camps starting at $75 for the week, but registration opened Feb. 7. Said differently, I’m waitlisted for mid-August.
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