From 2002-2005 I worked at a camp that had a combined over night and day camp program. I worked at a Girl Scout camp.
How it worked: We got new over night campers each week. Those campers would come to camp on Sunday evening. We would run a basic opening night with them. Then the day camp program didn't start until Monday, and those campers got to camp at 9AM each day and left at 4PM. Fridays were tricky because that was also the last day of over night camp. Over night camp ended at 5PM on Friday. Many times we would run into problems with over night parents coming too early and getting mixed up with the day camp parents. Or the day camp parents would come too late and get mixed up with the over night parents. To help fix this was we split the parking lot into two zones, one for each type of camp. The parents were then directed to the zone they needed to be in. It helped a bit, but you can never really fix the problem with parents coming too early or too late.
During the day, the schedules would work itself out. We had a fairly large camp, so there were many places to go for both day and resident camp. The day camp was assigned an unused unit to keep their things, and the day camp was always scheduled for swimming during the resident camp rest hour. On Wednesday afternoons we would do a joint all camp activity with the day camp and resident camp. That was hit and miss, sometimes it worked great... other times not so much.
Staffing for this type of camp can be very tricky. We didn't hire a separate staff for day camp and resident camp. Our staff was told on Friday night before their weekend off what group they would be with. Each staff member would do day camp at least once during the summer. For some reason, day camp was not as cool as over night camp. In the evenings when the day camp staff didn't have campers, they were assigned to an over night group for evening activity and also where to sleep. This became stressful for the day camp staff because they really had two groups of campers to keep track of. After I left the camp in 2005, it was changed where the day camp staff slept in a unit on their own, without campers. This helped with the stress level, but it also created a type of anomosity between the two groups of staff.
Like I said the camp space was fairly large, and we did have a lot of campers. I believe one week I worked we had about 200 resident campers and 100 day campers. When we had larger numbers of campers, we would get volunteers to work the day camp side of camp. Overall, I loved it. It turned into a great experience for me that has helped me with my organizational skills. In 2005 (my last summer) I stayed in day camp, and it was great because I got the best of both worlds.
- Teenster
