Jane MacLean and her husband, Dan, own Sweet Roots Farm & Market in Charlotte. Summer is their busy season. While they’re providing nourishing food to customers, they need someone else to nourish their young children, ages 6 and 2.5.
Their daughter attends preschool year-round. But when classes end for their first grader, they’ll be on their own to find something to occupy him.
The MacLeans are one of many Vermont households scrambling to sign kids up for some of the area’s many summer programs. Day and sleepaway camps offer exciting enrichment experiences unavailable during the academic year. But for families like the MacLeans, in which parents or caregivers work outside the home, they provide something more basic and vital: childcare.
The competition for day camps, especially in Chittenden County, can be fierce.
Because many of these programs aim to make the experience accessible to as many kids as possible, they often limit the number of weeks children can attend. So parents such as the MacLeans, who can’t take the summer off, are left trying to fill 10 weeks of vacation one week at a time, juggling variables such as location, hours, price, registration window and activities. It’s a lot to manage.
I started thinking about this the week before Christmas.
Jane MacLean
“I started thinking about this the week before Christmas,” Jane MacLean said.
For starters, she prioritizes camps within half an hour of their home in Charlotte — though she will occasionally drive farther — and those that accept kids no later than 9 a.m. Early drop off is “rare, but possible,” she said. Otherwise, she won’t be able to get enough work in during the day, since most camps end at 3 or 4 p.m. “4:30 is the latest I’ve seen,” she noted.
Activities are also important. Right now, her little guy is “super active” and enjoys running around.
Price matters, too. Tuition at the camps on her list can run $265 to $565 a week for one child, depending on a slew of factors. “That’s just a lot of money,” she said.
So far, MacLean has been able to figure out most of the summer, though she couldn’t find a program for the first week. “Likely he’ll end up in ‘farm camp’ on our farm, which entails helping out at home and building a different set of skills than he will at camp all summer.”
Erin Buckwalter of Starksboro is in a similar situation. While she has a somewhat flexible job as the deputy director of engagement and development at the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, her husband, a builder, can’t take off much time during the busy summer season to be with their two boys, 8 and 11. “We really need summer options for our kids,” she said.
She’s got a list of nearby camps that both her boys like, and she stays on top of the sign-up times, particularly for popular options such as a mountain-biking camp run by the Bristol Recreation Department, which fills up within minutes. “I will be online at exactly when it opens and try to get a space,” she said.
Last year, registration opened while the family was visiting the Boston Museum of Science. Buckwalter remembers tapping away furiously on her phone while the boys pleaded with her to visit the next exhibit; she passed them off to her husband. They got into the camp for the week they wanted, though “in that moment, it was so stressful,” she said.
“I know camps are up against other challenges. I know they’re doing their best, too,” she added. But the way the system is currently configured, where every camp has its own way of handling registrations independent of all the others, makes it really difficult for families to plan ahead. “It’s like a set of dominoes. If one of those dominoes falls, sometimes your whole summer falls apart,” she said.
Buckwalter, like MacLean, plots all of her camp options on a spreadsheet. But neither of them has one quite as elaborate as that of their friend Neily Jennings of Charlotte, whose sons are 10 and 6.
Jennings shared her spreadsheet with Kids VT. Columns A through I detail variables such as the organization, the day registration opens, cost, drop-off/pickup times, ages and notes, with a link to the website. Rows 1 through 159 list the nearby camps. Organizations appear multiple times if they offer different themed programs throughout the season. She’s still hearing about new ones, such as the camps at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum.
Jennings started this year’s spreadsheet in January and has shared it with a handful of other parents. “I was just trying to keep track of what all the options were,” she said. “I started getting texts from mostly other moms, being, like, ‘My son is doing this Treewild camp. Is your son going, too?’ And so I was like, ‘OK, Treewild. I hadn’t heard of that one.’”
At some point, a friend told Jennings not to share her spreadsheet with anyone else, to avoid helping competitors for scarce camp spots. But “that’s not my vibe,” she said. She wants others to benefit from the information she’s collected.
Jennings and her husband, Connor Timmons, met as camp counselors in their early twenties. They also both worked at the Common Ground Center in Starksboro, which hosts a variety of camps — Jennings served as the operations director for five years, Timmons as the executive director for nearly nine.
“We both kind of hold camp as a really critical transformative experience for young people,” she said.
That said they’re not looking to keep their kids busy for the whole summer. Jennings, who now manages operations for a worker-owned cooperative of consultants, is able to take off a week to be with the boys. Timmons, the executive director of HomeShare Vermont, will do the same. And they’ll have one “feral” week, she said, during which one parent works at home and the kids are mostly on their own. “Maybe I’ll kick them outside and tell them they can’t come in until lunchtime,” she said.
“It’s a lot for kids to go from one camp to the next,” Jennings explained. “If I had to do that, go to a whole new group of adults every single week and be with them all day long in person doing activities, I would be so stressed out.”
She recommends giving kids a break for a couple of weeks during the summer, if possible. “That can help them recharge their batteries before they jump into a new group,” she said.
Sign-Up Suggestions
The moms interviewed for this story have tips for other parents navigating the process:
- Consult friends who have older kids. They can give you advice.
- Get on mailing lists for camps you like and make sure the emails are not going into your junk folder.
- Set reminders or alerts on your calendar, or whatever you use to keep organized, so you’ll know when it’s time to register.
- Create a document that lists the information camps will need so you can copy and paste it — for instance, the kids’ pediatrician’s office address and number, the dentist’s address and number, multiple numbers for emergency contacts, etc.
- If it’s your first time sending kids to day camp, cast a wide net. Sign them up for different types of programs until you get a sense of what they’re interested in.
- Find out what your kids’ peers are doing — maybe you can set up a carpool.
- Spend time in the fall reflecting on which camps best met your needs and why.
- Ask if there are scholarships or a sliding scale for tuition.
Advice for Camps
- Offer aftercare. Parents who work struggle to pick the kids up at 3 p.m.
- Get together and offer a “Common App,” so that parents can fill out one form with all the necessary info and choose which camps to send it to. If colleges can do it, maybe summer camps can, too?
A Request for the State of Vermont
- Is there a way to broaden the number of camps that are eligible to accept the state’s childcare subsidy? It would help parents afford tuition. This is something that would help the state keep young families.
A Request for Employers
- Be as flexible as possible with parents of school-age kids in the summer. They’re juggling a lot!
The original print version of this article was headlined “Summer Camp Counseling | Parents share their camp sign-up stress and offer suggestions — for parents, camps and the State of Vermont”
This article appears in Kids VT Camp Guide • 2026.
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