Want to reopen schools? Summer camps show how complicated it?ll be.

Many of the camp organizers National Geographic interviewed said that they had no known cases of COVID-19, yet not all child-care facilities have made it through the summer unscathed.PUBLISHED July 31, 2020Georgia Zengerle was on her way. Tom Rosenberg, the president and CEO of the American Camp Association, says that among the more than 15,000 camps in the U.S., 80 percent of overnight camps and 40 percent of day camps have shuttered this summer, and the industry faces a revenue loss of $16 billion.To limit risks to children and staff, the camps that opened have reimagined how they operate, according to those interviewed by National Geographic. “It’s clear to us now that we need to keep a third lane available and have that virtual camp experience.”While summer isn’t over yet, many camp organizers interviewed by National Geographic said they had no known cases of COVID-19, or had successfully isolated cases before the virus could spread. Allaso Ranch, a retreat center in Hawkins, Texas, held church camp sessions in July that campers’ parents say caused between 30 and more than 80 cases of COVID-19, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and two parents interviewed by National Geographic. Not all camps, or child-care settings writ large, can bring the same resources or facilities to bear.Safely running and attending camp during a pandemic is a privilege—one that highlights the economic and health inequities of the American summer, a gap that will only become starker as students return to school in the fall.“Many of the inequities and disparities along racial and ethnic lines in the U.S. are perhaps even more visible now, given the context,” says Rachel Thornton, an associate professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored a 2019 study of summertime for the National Academies.Camps have also noticed the indirect toll that coronavirus is taking on kids. The American Camp Association plans to do a retrospective survey of camps later this year, and Blaisdell has been collecting data on four Maine camps throughout the summer.Christakis says that camps’s successes and failures could provide a “very useful” baseline for schools, but he and others lament the lack of a clear national strategy for monitoring COVID-19’s spread through child-care settings.“There wasn’t the bandwidth, there wasn’t even the testing capacity, when we started … [that] should be prioritized, because we need to answer these questions,” Christakis says.For Lemel, Keystone Camp’s director, the stakes are too high for the nation to get reopening schools wrong—a message she’s also trying to carry into local government.