Dear Camp Families,
As many of you know, Governor Sununu announced this past Friday that summer day camps may start operating on June 22nd. Along with this announcement Sununu released a series of guidelines for opening camps. The Gundalow Company staff has spent the last several days reviewing these guidelines and aligning them with our existing program and safety standards and have come to the difficult realization that several of these guidelines make it impossible to operate our summer camp program as it exists. Based on the group size recommendations of 8 campers/group and the need to increase our staff so close to the start of camp, we are unable to hire, train and obtain the necessary certifications to provide a high quality program both from a financial as well as a safety perspective.
Despite these challenges, we feel strongly that it is important to provide a summer program to help serve our families and campers and have come to the conclusion that the only way to offer safe programming is to move from a full day program to a half day program. This will eliminate staffing difficulties, lunchtime, changing rooms, and other challenging guidelines we can’t meet with a larger full day program. We realize that this is not an ideal situation and will not help many of our families who are looking for full day childcare as they return to work, but we do feel like this still offers our campers the opportunity to get outside and on the water for fun and engaging activities this summer. This has been a very difficult decision for our organization as we try to balance the needs of the community, the safety of our staff and campers, and the changing recommendations from the state.
What will our Half Day program look like?
We are excited to be able to offer engaging, safe programs on the water this summer. During these 3 hour camp programs, we will kayak, row, visit islands, explore the shoreline and each group will take 1 sail aboard the Gundalow. Many of our programs are safe and fun even while maintaining social distancing.
COVID – 19 Guidelines to our Camp Program
We will be updating our 2020 camp COVID-19 guidelines on our website in the coming days based on recommendations from the state and we ask families to review this prior to the start of camp and to let us know if your camper is unable to operate within these guidelines. These guidelines include wearing a mask when unable to social distance, a quick health screening at the start of each day, and frequent hand washing. At this point the most important guideline is that per Governor Sununu’s order: Day camp attendees are restricted to children who are New Hampshire residents or out of state campers who have met a 14 day quarantine requirement. We are so sad, but this means we are unable to serve our Maine campers who are coming to NH just for camp. If you are not a NH resident or haven’t quarantined for 14 days prior to the start of camp, please request a refund using the form below..
Below is the process for moving forward with a camp program or for requesting a refund.
- Please fill out the form at this link with your preference moving forward and let us know if you prefer to switch to a half day program or request a refund.
- Please request a refund at least one month prior to the start of camp (if your camp is already within the month period, please contact us within 3 weeks of the start of camp). If you are within one month of the start of camp we cannot offer a refund as we need to commit to hiring and training staff.
- We plan to split our campers each week into a younger morning session and an older afternoon session. If your camper was signed up for one of our special or STEM camps, we will not be able to build ROV’s this summer and will be moving these programs to
- one of our half day river rats programs. If you’ve already emailed me preferences for keeping your campers with friends, we will try to honor this. If you have more than 1 camper enrolled for a week, we will plan to keep siblings together. If you prefer for us to separate them or have other preferences, please let me know.
- Morning programs will run roughly 9-12 and afternoon programs will run 12:30-3:30. Programs cost $200/week. We will still honor 10% discounts for members and siblings.
- Due to these changes, we are likely to have openings in some of our camp programs. We will begin listing camp openings on our registration page starting June 3rd and will continue to update them over the coming weeks and encourage our existing campers to sign up for these programs as spaces become available.
We are truly sorry for these changes but feel confident that we can still provide a wonderful and safe experience for our campers. As always, please reach out with questions or concerns.
Thanks,
Gretchen
