ACA Home Forums how many weeks?

I am the director at a medium sized day camp. Traditionally we run a full summer program but the last two years finding staff to work the final two weeks of the summer has proven challenging. Most of our staff are college students and they all return to school before our season ends. I was wondering how long other day camps tend to run their sessions, and where you find your staff.
Also, any suggestions for keeping the tone of your setting more camp-like and less school-age-care like would be appreciated. Our base is an indoor facility although we do take field trips to outdoor locations.

I hear what you're saying. This year we decided to run 5 weeks of our traditional day camp (which is usually 8-9 weeks) and the last three weeks will be smaller specialty camps requiring less staff.

Most of our counselors are return staff (thankfully) bit we have had good luck with Craigslist, much more so than with posting at local colleges or in the paper, which we do as well.

As for keeping things more camp like:
1. Sing camp songs, a lot
2. Keep the campers in groups assigned to one or two counselors
3. Stay outside as much as you can
4. Play group games
5. Play camp wide games
6. Have special events; small carnival, makeshift campfire with skits, songs and stories, puppet show, etc.
7. Have activities or classes that campers can choose to attend for the week; crafts, drama, sports, drum circles, puppets, film making, swimming, etc.
8. Have a theme each week (this is huge).
9. Bring in Special Guests; animal show, magician, pirate troupe, theater group, etc.

At our los angeles summer camp , we used to run 10 weeks but cut down to 9 for a few reasons, one of which is just what you're saying: it's not easy to staff those last few weeks! By dropping the 10th week we've lost some revenue but losing the staffing headaches was worth the tradeoff. Operating for 9 weeks has been a nice compromise; we generally don't have too much trouble staffing for that last week

I've seen a similar trend, especially with staff that are active in orientations or those that are RAs at school. Our last week of day camp runs August 17-20. Although I consider myself fortunate that registrations always tend to die down those last few weeks that I'm also losing staff. So I may have to close out some weeks and turn some campers away, but it's not a majority of customers by any means.

Thanks for all the replies. One of my big concerns about the number of weeks our camp runs is that the last two weeks are actually when we have had the most campers. Most camps in our area are only open for an 8 week block. That makes it even harder as we are getting campers new to our camp at the same time that we have had other campers who have been with us for most of the summer. My full summer campers are settled in and want to maintain the traditions they have helped establish at camp, my last two week campers (and parents) come to me with expectations based on whatever their camping experiences from earlier in the summer have been. Plus I have new counselors as many of my college age ones are heading back to school. The dynamic those last two weeks is completely different than the rest of the summer. We still have tons of fun, but it is different. It's almost like I am running two seperate camps.