Covering All Bases: Concordia Camp Meeting Every Need

While summer camp directors all over the country are of coping with a slow economy – from offering a greater number of specialized programs to returning to a more traditional outdoor camp format – organizers at the Concordia Day Camp in Bronxville are taking a rather unique approach to attracting the customers of today: Ask, and you shall receive. 

Between its comprehensive enrichment program, which includes such classes and activities as dance, sculpture, cooking and gardening, to both its competitive and non-competitive sports camps, to its newly implemented off-site camp, the Concordia Day Camp quite simply has something for just about every camper of every age, which is exactly how Camp Director Ceil Warren likes it.

“We basically said yes to everything this year,” she said. “In today’s economy, people want a week-by-week program, and we really accommodated that this year. You try to be as flexible as you can.” 

Both the camp’s enrichment program and sports camps – offered twice each summer for periods of three weeks – are age specific, and include sections for “early childhood” campers ranging from three to five years-old as well as children grade one through nine.

Held in the morning, the enrichment program goes through a complete remodeling every single summer, something organizers say helps the camp stay current with what campers are interested in. The program also has an important educational proponent to it, although what campers learn on any given day can be completely different from the next.

“Our morning program is not the run of the mill arts and crafts,” Warren said. “This is a really dynamic program where kids take away some type of knowledge base or skill set. It’s very innovative, very current.” 

Class offerings available as part of the enrichment program include cartooning and animation workshops, gardening activities and even an engineering course, where campers design and build their own model skyscrapers, playgrounds and highways. In one of the camp’s most popular classes, “Beads to Benefit Others,” campers learn about entrepreneurship by designing and then selling their own jewelry, with all proceeds going to “Hands Up For Haiti,” an organization which provides food and care for the people of Haiti. 

More than just reshaping individual classes and workshops, however, organizers at Concordia have sought to cater to the needs of a completely different pool of campers this summer, adding a competitive basketball camp for children age six to 16. The camp already has a more general and non-competitive sports program, but after numerous requests from parents for something more competition intensive – and a very successful first summer with the basketball camp – Warren says more competitive sports programs will be added in the very near future.

“We need to have a competitive sports camp element, and we are looking into that,” said Warren, who hinted that plans for baseball and lacrosse camps are in the works. “The basketball camp was very successful this year. We were surprised that the enrollment was what it is. We are definitely looking to expand that aspect of the camp for next year.”

Another program quickly gaining in popularity is Concordia’s “Day-Trip Adventures,” a creation spurred on by numerous parent appeals for camp programs to continue longer into the summer than they originally did.

“Day-Trip Adventures” is a completely off-site camp, allowing directors to hand the Concordia College campus back to its students and faculty in the second half of August while still providing the services asked for by campers and parents. For just over $500 a week, campers are taken charge of from nine in the morning to four in the afternoon, and brought on trips to a wide variety of local and more faraway venues and locations, including Yankee Stadium, the Empire State Building, the Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Beczak Environmental Center in Yonkers.

“The kids just have a ball with this, and parents are loving it,” Warren said. “It’s priced right, and your child is going off campus and seeing great things. I’ve always believed that if you love what you do, you will be successful. And I love what I do and I know our teachers do too.”

So while today’s parents are faced with the tough task of picking the right summer camp for their kids in this tough economy, it seems like those considering the Concordia Day Camp might be running into their own different kind of problem – picking exactly which one of the dozens of programs offered to register their children for…