It has always been our belief since beginning The Marcus Lewis Day Camp in 2002 that summer camp should be for everyone, however not everyone can afford a $600/week program. Although we have never turned away anyone who qualified financially for a scholarship, there is a population of families whose level of earnings disqualify them from a scholarship but their income is not enough to make sending their children to camp a drop in the budgetary bucket. Parents who utilize day care during the year are also all too familiar with the incredible expense of after-school supervision.

Moving to a new site with more space and more amenities, we asked ourselves if there would be a way to service parents who were either:

a. Falling into an in-between financial bracket, or

b. Not interested in all of the bells and whistles of a premium day camp.

In order to answer this, we had to first examine costs. Staffing is always a camp's greatest expense and we needed to find a way to lower this without compromising safety. We cannot budge on our belief that supervision should be in the hands of counselors 18 years and older, however what we could do is raise the counselor to camper ratios. The ratios in our base camps hover around 5:1, however most certifying bodies allow for a 10:1 relationship which is our max number for Mini-Marcus. Although we utilize a junior assistant to aid the counselor for this specific program, the helper does not supervise the campers, nor do we include the helper when calculating our ratios (i.e. many camp programs promote low camper to counselor ratios because they include their junior assistant as part of that formula).

Our second biggest expense is the choice curriculum that we offer with our Junior Discovery/Teen Exploration programs. Allowing campers to choose their courses on a daily basis is costly to orchestrate, however with Mini-Marcus, the curriculum is predetermined and therefore much less expensive to design. It also does not include electives such as rocketry, robotics, fencing, etc. which are very costly activities when multiplied out with hundreds of campers.

Finally, if we factor in the additional, unused space that is already part of our overhead, then what you are left with is a camp option that will fill the needs of basic summer child care for an unbelievable price.

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