Working Parents Face Tough Decision On Day Camps

Nashville is reopening its economy and working parents are facing a tough decision: what to do with their kids during a pandemic.

For many Middle Tennesseans that would normally include day camps.

Some are open, others are closed, and parents have been left with a need for care while receiving mixed messages on what is safe.

Overnight camps are closed in Nashville and will be until the next phase of the city’s economic reopening plan. Many day camps — a mix of everything from specialized sports to glorified daycare — are also shut down. But some private schools, independent companies and religious groups are open and have been making their appeal on social media.

That includes Deer Run in Williamson County. It was scheduled to open the first week of June but pushed back because 35 staff members tested positive for COVID-19. Those staff members are now quarantining, and Deer Run is hoping to reopen in two weeks.

The outbreak has given Jana Perry pause. She is a single mom in Williamson County and was planning to send her 10-year-old son to Deer Run but is unsure now. He attended two camps last summer, but both are shut down this year. She says if they had been open, she would have felt confident in their ability to assess safety needs. But after they shuttered, it made her question the other options that remained.

For Perry, day camps are not a luxury; they are a necessary piece of the summer puzzle. She has seven weeks of care to cover — between grandparents, vacation and other ways — to avoid leaving her child at home alone.

When he is home, Perry worries about her son’s lack of active options. The pool and playground at her complex are closed and there’s very little space outside. She says there’s a “decision tree” to consider in the weeks ahead, and safety isn’t necessarily at the top.

“Just honestly as a single parent my first thought was the job is primary,” Perry says. “Because if I don’t get paid then we’re all going to be sunk.”

Jeff Merhige, the executive director of the YMCA’s Camp Widjiwagan, understands the need for options and the desire for parents to know that the places they are sending their children are safe.

He says “no one can guarantee no exposure.” But he defaults back to the fact that he’s a dad, and he wants to be able to look at other parents and promise that they’ve done everything in their power to “train the staff, change the facility and change the program to limit” exposure to the virus.

Merhige says Nashville health officials and walked their grounds and he joined with other organizations, like the American Camp Association and the CDC, to help develop safety guidelines.

When ‘Together’ Means ‘Stay Apart’

Some parents aren’t as worried about the pandemic. They point out the low number of children seriously impacted by the virus, and Dr. David Aronoff, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt, acknowledges that. He says, for most people, the pandemic is “not so severe that they would even get hospitalized,” but there’s still a vulnerable population to keep in mind.

“People are dying of this infection,” Aronoff says. “And so this is a time where we need to understand that there can be severe consequences of viral transmission outside of our immediate point of view.”

He also notes that the “virus doesn’t know if a kid is at a camp or not” and that kids have been generally taught not to stay away from other children. He says now that the word “together” is modified by “and also stay apart,” that can be very difficult. The younger a child is the harder it is to enforce that on a regular basis.

Erica Schultz, a Metro Nashville schoolteacher, says she doesn’t “know how they are going to do it.”

She planned to send her daughter to a day camp but is unsure. Her daughter will still go to a ballet program that promised reduced class sizes and a stringent cleaning regimen. But Schultz says there are other factors beyond sanitizing and social distancing to consider.

There’s the possibility of other kids “coming from families where they feel like the virus is a hoax or the virus is just a flu.” She says she encounters those parents.

“If they say, ‘Well, I feel like masks are disrupting my rights,’ I’m like ‘cool’ and I step a couple inches away with my mask, right?” Schultz says.

That situation isn’t as easy with children, who might not fully understand what’s going on.

“But I have to really weigh out, also, just my child’s sanity.”

That’s a calculation many working parents are having to make with no certainty of how an unprecedented spring will give way to an unknown summer.