WJCC announces summer day camp plans to much fanfare

The WJCC has a COVID19 screening in place. (Healey photo)

WINDSOR JUNCTION: It was a long-awaited announcement that many were waiting for from the Windsor Junction Community Centre.

After wrestling with what to do for their summer camp due to COVID19 and the public health restrictions in place, the WJCC Board announced on June 17 their plans for the upcoming summer. It has received rave reviews from many commenters on their Facebook page.

The plans as announced are as follows:

This has been a long time coming, we are here to announce the details of the WJCC Summer Camp 2020.

We are very happy to be able to offer a WJCC camp this summer! Within the last week, Nova Scotia Public Health has released COVID protocols and criteria for summer camps, allowing the Board of Directors and the WJCC Camp leadership to create a plan that will embrace Public Health guidelines, provide fair camp access to the community as well as retain most of the WJCC experience that we know and love.

WJCC Camp will start July 6th and will run through to August 28th. WJCC camp will be broken down into four, two week blocks. The blocks cover the following dates (Monday through Friday) :

July 6th to July 17th.

July 20th to July 31st.

August 3rd to August 14th

August 17th to August 28th.

Campers will be required to register for the full two week block. To comply with social distancing requirements as well as maintain proper staff to camper ratios we will be restricting our density to 32 campers per day. We will form four pods of 8 campers and 2 staff. These pods will stay together for the duration of the two week block, safely isolating from other pods. One of these pods will be reserved for an inclusion spot, meaning 7 campers and 3 staff.

Understanding the low headcount will induce competition for spots, we have altered our registration process to provide opportunity for as many campers as possible to experience the WJCC camp through the summer of 2020.

We will be holding a REGISTRATION LOTTERY.

To start the registration process we ask all interested families to rank each of the 2 week blocks from 1 to 4 (1 being the most sought after for the family, 4 being the least). We will collect all of these ranked registration requests and create a list of all registrants. We will then use random sorting to reorder the list. From there we move down the list, assigning the highest priority available week to each applicant until all of the weeks are full, or until all applicants have a 2 week block. If there are more openings, we will communicate a date and time when we will fully open online registration, and then it will be first come, first serve to consume the remaining slots.

We will open the lottery later this week and leave it open for a few days. Look for further communication about the exact dates very soon. We will then process the requests, communicate the results and then open it up to fill the rest of the slots in first come first server.

To be included in the registration lottery, the following information will be required :

Guardian Name
Guardian Email
Camper Name
Camper Address
Camper Phone
Camper DOB
Rank of the 4 camp blocks
Indication if have registered through Amelia with us before.

Once camp is up and running there will be numerous considerations undertaken to protect our campers, staff and facilities from COVID-19 impact. We will be closely adhering to Provincial Health policy. We will follow up with these policies shortly, although it would help for guardians to review the release Public Health guidelines for day camps to get an early understanding of our requirements.

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With regulations changing often, we may have an opportunity to tweak the program as the summer progresses. Perhaps we’ll be able to expand our offerings if the good news continues. However, there is also the risk that we may need to roll back our plans if things take a turn for the worse.

For now, we are very happy that we are able to offer a 2020 version of WJCC Summer Camp. We hope that WJCC branded red hats, the waters of 3rd lake and the echoes of laughter that fill our grounds will be an anchor for our children through all the change.

Let’s go make some memories!