To give you some context for my review, I'm a former camp counselor and director with over 10+ years experience. I was a member of the American Camping Association. I am very familiar with children's camping programs and all that goes into them. As such, I was very excited to go camping with my students and Positive Adventures for our end of year culmative bonding trip.
The cost per student was high, but not out of range for an all-inclusive multi-day camping trip. However, those programs usually include activities you can't experience without them, such as high ropes, kayaking, or archery. Our original activity list was the following: hiking to the beach, a "Great Race" organized game, hiking the local mountains, night hikes, stargazing, visiting a llama farm, tide pooling, swimming in the pool, and fort building on the beach. Of all these activities, the only one that required the company to arrange it was the llama farm (which really was super cool, and next time I go to SB I will go back). They did arrange for us to have a lifeguard for the two hours we were allowed to use the pool as well.
The next big issue was the food. When you're exercising as much as we were (my step meter was recording us going 5-7 miles a day, often on pretty hardcore hikes), you should be eating a lot of protein and complex carbs to give you lots of energy and rebuild muscle. You should also eat small meals pretty frequently. Here's a sample day of what we ate. Breakfast was 1/2 a bagel, two tablespoons cream cheese, 1/2 a banana, 1/4 a orange. Lunch was a sandwich with one slice of lunch meat, one slice of cheese, two slices of tomato, and a piece of lettuce. Snack was a Nature Valley granola bar or fruit snacks (not both). Dinner was a burrito bar with one flour tortilla, cheese, black beans, corn, peppers, and white rice. Estimated caloric content: 1200 calories. Probably around 7 grams of protein, and the only complex carb was the banana. Five students ended up throwing up during the trip, and I blame it on the lack of nutrition and extreme exercise. The funny thing is that us chaperones had a fantastic additional spread of food. We snuck most of it to our students. The counselors didn't seem to like that very much. The students spent so much of their own money (and ours) on Cup O Noodles and ice cream at the shop just because they were starving! I brought a lot of my own snacks, and passed them all out so they didn't pass out. I've done a ton of trips like this- you overfeed the kids. Snacks should be things like cheese cubes and jerky. Meals should be bacon in the morning and chicken for dinner. For God's sake, at least use brown rice so the kids keep full a little bit longer! Throw some tofu or chicken in the burrito- you can bring the chicken precooked even. Snacks should be bountiful and filling. A single fun size fruit snack is mind-bogglingly useless on a long hike.
On the Day of Endless Hiking (eat half a bagel if you're lucky- a rice cake if you're not, hike up a ~1000 foot mountain, hike to the beach, eat a single hot dog, go on a night hike, then stargaze) us teachers rebelled. We stopped at dinner, and told the staff our kids had hiked too much, and were no longer enjoying themselves. I jumped in and planned some games at the park. The kids were having a great time until we were stopped due to liability. Now, I get liability. I know what can happen to a camp if the wrong kid twists their ankle. But my "unsafe" game seemed a much safer choice than a night hike on 1000 empty calories after that many miles had already been done.
In short, don't use this program for your students. They just plain don't get kids. If I'm going to haul my butt into the wilderness with a bunch of adolescents, I want it to be worth it. With CELP on Catalina or Tom Sawyer Camps in Death Valley, it is. Positive Adventures, in the end, was neither positive nor an adventure. read more
