UBC Camps

I had my daughter last year in the smash and swim camp. She was 5 years old. I found the kids running the program had attitude, did not make eye contact or acknowledge the parents. I attended one lunch to see how my daughter was. The instructors were all sitting in a circle talking while the kids were running around outside on the field. I couldn’t see my 5 yr old which happened to be around the building! So on hot dog day which is normally on Fridays (last day of camp), I attended that too. There was a room full of kids eating hot dogs and no one was supervising them. There was no one in the room! (Hot dogs are high risk choking food). This year I enrolled both my kids thinking the camp was run better. My kids were sent home a notice that Friday was hot dog day (a donation from save on foods) so don’t bring a lunch just a snack. Hot dog day was cancelled and my kids had no lunch-​no one called me or told me. Apparently when I called, they were very sorry we weren’t informed that hot dog day was cancelled because the camp organizer forgot to organize the BBQ! So $ 600 (300 each kid for camp) would have had better spent somewhere else.

I’m reviewing this separately from the UBC non-​aquatics camp, as they are separate entities. Sadly, each organization is in equally rough shape. How to describe it? This camp and its optional lunch session were even more disorganized than the Aquatics one. Again, the aspects I saw were total chaos, with no one knowing who is doing what, who is responsible for each child, etc. There was no back-​up venue set up in case of rain. Well, it rained –because, well, it’s VANCOUVER! In the lunchroom, staff sat with their backs to the kids. Later, when one child ran around pushing several smaller kids to the ground, a leader watched, did nothing, then caught my observing eye, and only then said lethargically to the child, «Hey, man, maybe don’t do that…» After a three hour session, none of the staff were able to identify who any of the kids were, nor which ones they needed to transfer to a subsequent location. A number of young children were left in utter confusion, several to the point of obvious stress (teary eyes, etc) on their faces. Where was the «UBC excellence» I’d anticipated? Where was the energy and vigour of the school’s athlete’s? Where was the basic child care awareness? Even though this was well into the summer, so they’d had several weeks to get it together, I assumed this was a one-​off, that is, just a really, really bad day for the UBC camps. But when I talked to just one other person about this experience, they replied, «Yeah, my boss almost killed one of the leaders over [a major safety issue imposed on the six year old girl the previous year].» And then I found this online review:
(scroll to the second one, 8÷31÷10) which well-​expressed the types of concerns I saw in 2012. Yikes.