The Forest Hills Parents Facebook group is always active, but the weeks after Christmas are especially busy.
Parents of young children in the family-friendly Queens neighborhood flood the group with questions about summer camp: Are there good options nearby? What should I expect to pay?
Juliana Chessin, a mother of two, winces when she sees those posts. She doesn’t know whether to tell her neighbors the truth: It’s probably already too late to get a spot for next summer.
Ms. Chessin was that parent once, before she got wise to the informal hazing ritual experienced by many New York City parents when they think they’ve finally made it through the most logistically complex and expensive years of child care.
After white-knuckling through spending tens of thousands of dollars each year on day care, including during the summer months, parents wait for the relief of free prekindergarten or public elementary school.
Then it hits like a lightning bolt: summer camp.
“If you’re doing it for the first time, or you need something different at the last minute, to be impolite, you’re screwed,” Ms. Chessin said.
Families with young children have fled New York City in recent years, in part because of the astronomical cost of child care, a trend that has shrunk the local public school population and transformed the city’s culture.
As the city’s voters have seized on the issue, politicians have embraced the idea that they should play a greater role in providing free and low-cost care for young children. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s most ambitious campaign promise — creating a universal child care system for all children younger than 5 — is now his most complex governing task.
But it is not yet clear whether Mr. Mamdani will seek to create more year-round options for parents, and child care during the summer months remains a veritable Wild West, where the private market still reigns supreme.
In one of the most expensive, competitive cities on the globe, popular summer programs can fill up by the preceding September. And if parents are lucky enough to land a spot, many have to figure out how to actually pay for it.
Some camps cost more than a year of Catholic school in Manhattan, while others only reveal their pricing upon request. Even camps that are considered comparatively less expensive can cost thousands of dollars per child, for just part of the day, for only a few weeks of the summer.
Some of these programs end at two or three in the afternoon. Without the after-school infrastructure that is in place during the regular school year, parents may have to leave work early on alternating days or find short-term, afternoon-only babysitters to fill the gaps.
Conversations with nearly a dozen New York City parents about summer camp revealed a range of creative coping mechanisms.
Some decamp to friends’ or relatives’ homes outside New York. Others who can afford to travel overseas fly to Canada, or even as far as Europe, where they work remotely for the summer — and actually end up saving money. French day camps in particular are known to be relatively affordable, costing as little as 100 to 300 euros per week, compared with some programs in New York that can run $1,000 a week or more.
Still others plan their annual vacations for a locally infamous dead zone in mid-to-late August, between the time when most camps end and the city’s school year begins. They visit states where school has already begun so their children can enjoy kid-friendly activities without the crowds.
This year, quirks of the city’s public school calendar have left a city that loves to plan ahead in the lurch.
Though the Department of Education has not yet released its calendar, tea readers have determined that the first day of school is likely to be Sept. 10, later than usual, because of a late Labor Day and an early Rosh Hashana. (The teachers’ union contract stipulates that school cannot start before Labor Day.)
That will leave many parents with children in camp on the hook to find care for almost a full month before school starts. Single-week camps that parents often use to bridge the time — five days at the Central Park Zoo or in a coding boot camp, for example — can cost $800 or more. (Interested in the zoo camp? The entire summer is already booked.)
Ms. Chessin now has her summer strategy down to a science: this past year, she enrolled her older son in a nearby day camp in September, when early registration opened for existing families.
Her younger son’s free prekindergarten program has a private summer camp, and early sign-up runs for about a week in January — but there are no guarantees that families enrolled for the school year will get a summer spot. She forgot to enroll her son on the first day of sign-up and panicked, but was able to secure a seat.
All told, she and her husband will spend over $11,000 this summer on seven weeks of camp for their two sons.
“These are supposed to be the affordable years, but it’s like, affordable for who?” said Ms. Chessin, whose children attend public schools. “Obviously living in New York City is a choice, but it should be a choice that is fine for regular people to make. You shouldn’t have to be a millionaire.”
While the city does offer free summer camp options, demand far outstrips supply.
The Education Department contracts with nonprofits and social service organizations to offer no-cost camps through its Summer Rising initiative, which has about 110,000 slots; last year, about 150,000 families entered the lottery for seats. (There are about 900,000 children enrolled in city public schools, and hundreds of thousands more in private schools.)
On the other end of the spectrum, the city and its surrounding areas have many popular day camps with price tags that are out of reach for most.
The Brooklyn private school Poly Prep, which has a suburban-feeling campus popular with families looking for space for their children to run around, charges $4,995 for six weeks. New Country Day Camp, set on 75 acres of campground on Staten Island, costs $7,500 for seven weeks. Pierce Country Day Camp on Long Island runs $12,700 for eight weeks, including busing back and forth from Manhattan.
Camp Ramaquois in the lower Hudson Valley, which offers swim, drama and soccer for its youngest campers, does not post prices on its website, instead asking parents to submit an inquiry. A full summer session costs $12,710 for campers who need busing from Manhattan, according to a brochure recently sent to a parent. Ramapo Country Day Camp, which sits on 35 acres nearby, runs $13,595 for the full summer, including busing and lunch, according to a brochure.
And several sleep-away camps in Maine popular with New York City families cost $17,000 or more for a full summer, with sessions that run from late June to mid-August.
Some expensive programs try to accommodate families that could not otherwise afford them. Asphalt Green, which boasts large swimming pools at its two Manhattan locations, charges $9,350 for children between 4 and 8 years old to attend camp for the full summer. The organization spent about $240,000 on scholarships for 41 campers last summer, and offers a sliding scale tuition at its Brooklyn location.
But Asphalt Green’s chief executive, Jordan Brackett, knows those offerings can’t begin to address the need for affordable summer options. By February, at least one of the organization’s locations was running a wait-list.
“This is a classic New York City issue of scarcity,” he said.
To try to ease the collective burden of summer planning, some parents have taken matters into their own hands.
A few years ago, when Nadia Nguyen’s children were 3 and 5, she spent weeks trying and failing to find a camp that both could attend at the same time and that wouldn’t be too far from their home in Inwood.
“I’m an epidemiologist, so I think in tables,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m going to make a spreadsheet and try to figure this out.’”
The resulting list of dozens of camps turned into the public Uptown Family Calendar Summer Camp Directory, which sorts summer programs by price, age, theme and availability. Green and red color coding indicates which weeks various programs are open. (The calendar’s cheerful tagline: “Looking for a summer camp? Your neighbors have the scoop!”)
Now, every year, around Christmas break, when people in her Upper Manhattan parent chats start asking for summer camp advice, Ms. Nguyen knows exactly what to do.
“That’s when I pull out the spreadsheets,” she said.
Eliza Shapiro reports on New York City for The Times.
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