For parents who utilize the municipally run summer camps, it stinks that fees have shot way up this year.
For everyone else, well, they should not be placed in a position to help subsidize it, except in specific financial cases.
Further, if the sticker shock has you exasperated as a parent, blame municipal councillors more so than Chatham-Kent staff.
In April of 2023, staff sent a report to council recommending a more limited hike on the Stay-N-Play and KIDventure camps. Instead of increases of 123 per cent and 61 per cent respectively, staff proposed hikes of 23 per cent per program. However, council said no and sent the situation to the four-year budget planning process which began last fall.
Sure, there would have been another jump in the price from 2023 to 2024, but with an initial rate hike last year, it would not have been such a shock.
As Kelly Emery, director of children’s services for the municipality, told this newspaper, by running the Stay-N-Play camps at the per-child cost of $61 a week (pre-2024 levels), C-K was not covering the cost. In other words, other taxpayer cash was being used to cover the shortfall, regardless from which reserve the funds originated.
There are subsidy programs for people with limited financial ability to help get their children to summer camps. We wholeheartedly approve such programs.
But the notion of other taxpayers shelling out coin to help send the kids of parents who are in much better financial situations is just plain annoying.
Furthermore, the registration process for summer camps, which opened April 22, takes place largely online. When the clock struck midnight, parents could log in. In the past, those camps filled in minutes.
So anyone who could not be online at that time, whether it was for work, family, lack of home Internet or other reasons, chances are you would not have the opportunity to put your children in any of those day camps.
It is an imperfect system, but it is improving.
Completely disagree that tax payers shouldn’t shell out to get local kids access to camps. We might not all be parents, but we were all kids once. Do you think all the kids from that waitlist that disappeared will be comforted, knowing they’re saving tax payers a few bucks by sitting at home all summer? The subsidy applies after you’ve paid – that’s no help to parents who don’t have the money to begin with. They didn’t even get a warning of this increase. As the article says – 23% increase was proposed to the community. Total BS.