Since her son was 11, Deborah Lamden has run Partners in Adventure, a summer camp for Vermont kids with disabilities.
Before she started the camp, she had been enrolling her son, who has cerebral palsy, in all the camps she could find, from YMCA camps to Shelburne Farms camps and everything in between. But even though the camps tried to be accommodating, they just moved at a pace too fast for him to keep up with. By the time he made it to one activity, everyone else was already switching to the next one.
That’s when Lamden sent a survey to all parents in the area whose kids also had disabilities — and she found that they were as desperate for an accessible summer camp as she was.
So she decided to start her own. For 21 years, Partners in Adventure has drawn hundreds of kids every summer from all over the northern half of the state for activities such as horseback riding, sailing, and arts and crafts that, at most summer camps, they wouldn’t be able to pursue at their own pace.
Partners in Adventure hosts nine weeks of summer camp, a week of winter camp, and then a slew of events throughout the rest of the year, such as Fitness Fridays and Saturday Nights Out, where the campers get together for bowling, swimming, or having dinner together during the school year.
But in March, when Covid-19 hit Vermont, Lamden said all those activities came to a screeching halt. Lots of her campers are at high risk for the virus, and it just wasn’t worth it to compromise their safety — even though she knew those meet-ups were the highlights of many campers’ weeks.
“Many of the kids have developmental disabilities, and didn’t understand social distancing,” she said. “Some of them drool, or wouldn’t understand to cover their mouth when they cough or sneeze. We felt like we had no choice but to stop.”
But, Lamden said that, when it became clear that the virus would be around for more than just a few months and summer camp was likely off the table, “It was a really crushing blow for all of us,” she said.
Then Lamden began talking to her staff. Many of the camp’s counselors work in schools during the school year, and were learning how to use tools like Google Classrooms and Zoom — and they thought they might be able to take Partners in Adventure online.
So that’s what they did. This summer, Lamden scheduled six full weeks of activities, all adapted for online — and she offered them completely free to all her campers.
In the beginning of the camp, she asked parents for donations, and was able to make back a tiny fraction of the operating costs. But for the most part, Lamden said it’s been a money-losing summer for the camp.
“We didn’t go into it to make money, though,” she said. “We’re here to provide an essential program for kids who, during this Covid period, don’t understand why they can’t see their friends or go to camp like they normally would do.”
The camp operates through Google Classroom. Every weekday at 9 a.m., a new video went live, teaching campers about things like beekeeping, African drumming, or the color spectrum. The videos feature many of the same experts who participated when the camp was in-person, but others are totally new. For the video on beekeeping, Lamden said she just asked her neighbor, who keeps bees, to help her out.
Then, as a follow-up to each video, there’s a hands-on activity — usually a kind of arts and crafts or a science experiment — that relates to what the campers were learning that day. Lamden and her team also distribute supplies to all the campers at the beginning of the week, so they have the materials they need to work on the projects.
And every Friday, the campers all get together for a Zoom meeting, where they can sing, dance, show off their projects, and talk about the best part of their week — though many of the campers said their highlight is actually the Zoom meeting where they see their friends.
“I actually have a video from the first Zoom of my son reacting to seeing people online,” Lamden said. “He hasn’t seen anybody since January, really, and suddenly he was able to look at this screen and see all the people he knew. He was so excited.”
Lamden said even for the campers who went to school virtually in the spring, it was hard for a lot of schools to offer online special education programs that could really engage with the kids, so for many of the campers, it had been months since they had this kind of structure in their weeks.
The camp’s virtual format might not work for every camper, Lamden said, but it does make things a little bit easier. Once a video is up, it’s up for good. So if a camper has trouble sitting still or focusing, he or she can watch for just a few minutes, and then come back to any of the lessons at a later time. Lamden said she’s heard from parents that’s made a big difference.
“It seems like it works for a lot of kids with quite a variety of different disabilities,” she said. ”Has it left anyone out? Yes, I’m sure. But we’re just doing the best we can, and it’s been pretty powerful.”