Summer Day Camp

If you follow this page on FaceBook, you probably saw on Monday that we got the notification that The Boy was accepted and placed in the Autism Society’s new Summer Day Camp in our area. I was on pins and needles all day waiting for the notification because there were only 30 spots, and I just knew they would be overwhelmed with applicants. They didn’t seem overly worried, but I was up at midnight when registration went live, just in case. Good thing too, as they ended up taking kids that qualified in order of the date and time of registration!

In any case, it is completely grant funded (in other words FREE), and runs for six weeks, every damn weekday, from 9am to 5pm. Down here in the land of “ESY?? We don’t got no stinkin’ ESY!” this is a golden opportunity. Trained staff, fun activities, 1:1 and 2:1 ratios…

And vans. Six of ’em. To take the kids places.

You see, even though I have the perspective to be able to see how awesome this will be, The Boy still sees it as a change from summers past. Camp Smile, while it was the best we could hope for for the past three summers, wasn’t all that. And he hated it at first because it was so different from the awesome ESY program he had up north. But he grew to love it. And now, another change. So I had to sell it a bit when I told him yesterday. And I opened with the vans.

“What kind of vans are they?” he asked. He was hooked.

Do I know my kid, or what? 😉

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Summer Camp?

Our state and local chapters of the Autism Society held a meeting last night regarding all of the new and wonderful programming they are bringing to our area, focusing primarily on their summer day camp at a new-to-us facility that has been remodeled and improved. I was excited to get the information, find out about registration and see how much it would cost. While The Boy has enjoyed the summer program he has attended the past few years, it wasn’t quite what he needed, although something was better than nothing. And if the school district claims he doesn’t qualify for ESY, it was our only alternative.

This new program will be for six weeks (six weeks!), Monday through Friday (all week!), from 9am to 5pm (amazing!). And it will be free… Wait, what?

And there are only 30 slots.

Wait, what?

They went on to explain that first priority would be given to kids who do not receive any state services (pretty much everyone I know because you have to sacrifice your first born to get any kind of services around here), and to those who can attend the whole 6 weeks. OK, and do you not realize you are going to have hundreds of kids who fit that description? How will you decide among them?

Then they said it was open to kids with all diagnoses, and even siblings if there was room. And then they said it would be open to anyone in the area, not just people in our county…

A little bit of market research would have been appropriate here. I can’t believe they think that so few would be interested in this. I guess I’ll be up at Midnight on May 1, hoping the site doesn’t crash and trying to get registered before everyone else in the tri-county area…

hanging out