Maryland summer day camp provides specialized activities for children with disabilities

From The Washington Post:

Matthew Hoffman will spend much of his summer doing handwriting exercises set to music, practicing conversation techniques with other kids on the soccer field and improving his motor planning by learning to ride a bike.

In other words, the 6-year-old from Bethesda is going to camp.

Matthew has autism. So his five weeks at Basic Concepts in Rockville, which began June 28, will be different from the typical summer day camp in the Washington area.

Few counselors at Basic Concepts are home from college for the summer. The staff members are trained specialists in speech and occupational therapy as well as special education teachers and play therapists. And there are lots of them: one therapist for every two or three children. Equipment goes far beyond what you usually find at the playground, including weighted vests, trampolines and swings commonly used in therapy sessions.

"I love that he can go to a summer camp like every other kid," said Matthew's mother, Ali Hoffman.

Basic Concepts, a private therapy center offering speech and language services and other help for children with mild learning differences, began a therapeutic camp a decade ago with 10 children. This year, it is at capacity with 90 students and had to turn families away because of a lack of space, said Katy Whidden, a speech and language pathologist at the center.

Across the Washington region, enrollment in therapeutic camps soars every year, although they are far more expensive than traditional day camp.

Camp Friendship, which is run by Tots to Teens, a speech therapy practice in Woodbridge, drew kids from five counties last year for its program in Stafford County. This year, it is adding a session in Prince William County to meet the demand.

Lynne Israel, director of Lynne C. Israel and Associates in the District, an occupational therapy group, said she has been able to fill as many as 70 slots at her summer camp in recent years, with requests for more.

Complicated issues

Most campers have a combination of delays and diagnoses that can include autism spectrum disorders and learning disabilities as well as sensory processing problems, defined by difficulty handling certain sounds, sights, smells, textures and other environmental stimuli. These children struggle with reading, writing, cutting and sustaining conversations with other kids. Loud noises, bright lights or unfamiliar tastes or textures can disrupt or disorganize them.

Therapeutic camps, with small-group activities and individual plans for each camper, are often modeled after the weekly therapy sessions and classroom help that many of the children receive during the school year. The goals are the same: to improve their academic and social skills and help them better function in what often seems like an overwhelming world.

So cooking, for example, becomes a way to expand vocabulary and teach campers how to work together. Science experiments force children to get their hands dirty and get accustomed to new textures. Arts and crafts projects double as intense practice of fine motor skills.

"They give them therapy where they don't even know they're getting it," said Holly Jankowski of Germantown. Her daughter Apryl, 6, has pervasive developmental disorder, an autism spectrum disorder, and is in her third summer at Basic Concepts.

Thick pudding, chewy gummy bears and hard candy used to make Apryl turn her chair around away from the table. But at Basic Concepts, she has taken small steps to improve her diet: She must bring a snack to her lips, politely kiss it and put it back down on the plate before refusing it.

"It's a new strategy that they tried, and now we do that at home," her mother said.

Across the United States, as more children are found to have special needs, their parents are seeking help to hone such skills as handwriting and playground etiquette.

The number of summer day camps for children with special needs listed at http://www.mysummercamps.com, one of the largest online camp directories, has quadrupled, from 235 in 2004 to 971 this year, said Carol Mendelsohn, a spokeswoman for the site.

Susan Feeley is director of admissions at the Lab School in the District, a private school for students with learning disabilities, which also runs a summer camp. She attributes the growing demand, in part, to an increase in early diagnosis of children with learning differences and parents' understanding that early intervention can make a tremendous difference in a child's long-term success.

"Especially with younger children, the earlier you get remediation and therapy in place, while you can't change the blueprint of who the child is, you can really help the child develop quicker and develop coping mechanisms," Feeley said.

Allison Mistrett, an occupational therapist at Leaps and Bounds in the District, which offers a six-week camp for preschoolers, thinks that more strenuous academic demands for kindergartners are partly responsible for the increased interest. For children with learning delays, the standards at school are even more challenging.

"One of the things we hear more and more is that now kindergarten is what used to be first grade," Mistrett said. "I attribute a lot of it to the demands schools place on kids."

The downside of these camps is the price. The average day camp costs $100 to $275 per week, according to the American Camp Association. But a special-needs camp, with a different program for nearly every child, small therapist-to-student ratios and lots of expensive gym equipment, costs much more.

Camp Friendship is $500 for a week of half-day sessions. The Lab School's five-week program ranges from $1,275 to $2,735, depending on the activities. The six-week camp at Leaps and Bounds is $2,400.

But many parents are willing to pay. They consider summer a time for intense work on skills and an opportunity to help close the gap between their child and typically developing peers.

"Everything in the special-needs community is expensive, so I feel almost immune to it at this point," Hoffman said. Matthew would "get lost at a typical camp. This is really the best opportunity for him to have a camp experience but get extra help. So for me, it's totally worth it."

'Huge' social step

Jodie Steiner said she's hopeful that her son Gabriel Mini, 7, will get some help making friends during his three weeks of camp at the Treatment and Learning Centers in Rockville. Gabriel has autism.

"He really, really wants to be social. He likes to be part of a group, but he gets there and freaks out," said Steiner, of Takoma Park. "If he can get there and not be intimidated, that would be a huge step for him."

At Camp Friendship, one of the cooking activities will be making popcorn, to go with the camp's circus theme. Campers will watch the kernels pop and then talk to one another about it. Or, as the therapists see it, the activity will teach vocabulary and social language, said Jennifer Ruckner, a speech and language pathologist at Tots to Teens Therapy, which runs Camp Friendship.

"They're able to use very typical activities and learn how to play, how to use their language, how to socially use those skills to work simultaneously beside somebody, and an adult doesn't have to be there to prompt it all of the time," Ruckner said.

"That's what makes it different than going to a day camp."