NJ Youth Choir
Issues that surround the focus & survival of a youth choir campOne Week to Go – feature article
One Week to Go
One week to go. The most hectic and exciting week as we prepare for the final week to make sure everything is ready for the Diocese of NJ Youth Choir Week. This is the week that everything involved in getting the camp ready comes to a hopeful fruition as we make final preparations and confirmations.
Leading up to this week we make various plans and have various meetings throughout the year. We being myself, Rachel & Sheen McDill, Wade Cooper, Sydney Burlew, and whichever new counsellors can make the meetings. Usually we meet around four times over the course of the year. The time of year changes over the years as every-ones availability frequently changes being that almost everyone is in college and some high-school. This can cause some meetings to have everyone attend to only three or four of us.
The meetings consist of different topics depending what number meeting it is. We take the planning of things for the camp in steps as the meetings come up. Often, the first meeting is the outlining of potential ideas for activities and finances that we will have for the camp. The second and third meetings are the scheduling of the decided activities and working on the budget. The fourth meeting is always a month before the camp and is the confirmation meeting to makesure everything is and has been planned and finalized. Though, if anyone has ever been involved in the support and preparation of a camp such as this or any other, things never always go as planned and change at the last minute. Which, makes the week before the most hectic for everyone involved.
Rachel McDill (14 years at camp), the head chaperone, may have the most hectic of final weeks than everyone else. Especially since she is new to the position after being voted and appointed to it just last year. Our former head chaperone retired due to age and other interests. Rachel is involvedin every aspect of the camp, maybe not so in-depth in certain aspects as others are, but she oversees everything and has to make sure everyone is on top of the responsibilities. During the final week, which occurs the second to last week of July, she must organize all paperwork, volunteers, and medical information for the camp and campers. The paperwork involves the forms of all the campers, ranging from medical conditions to scholarships to attend the camp. “The medical paperwork is definitely the most difficult to do, becausethere are a lot of different aspects that go into organizing treatment and the best time to administer prescriptions and so on,” says Rachel. “Along with that, the volunteers who help throughout the week for preparing lunches and cleaning up need to be properly trained and understand what goes into their volunteering. The reason all this happens on the final week is because medical conditions always change and the volunteers have schedules and lives of their own, and we have to be on the same page at the last minute to make sure everything runs smoothly.”
Rachel’s husband, Sheen McDill (8 years at camp), is charge of all activities that we do for the entire week and an assistant head chaperone. We go to the zoo, the beach, and take different tours through Cape May every year. Sheen has to make sure all these things have been payed for in advance and confirm withthe needed people that everything is prepared. “The zoo trip and barbecue almost always is the troublesome activity. We always arrive the day of it and no-one seems to have any clue who we are and at what pavilion we are to go to,” says Sheen. Scheduling the activities may be the most aggravating and nerve racking, as without these activities, the camp would just be choir practice all day and the children would lose interest very quickly. Practicing as much as we do brings the children close to being burnt-out before the concert performance at the end of the week. Sheen usually confirms all the activities during the final week at least twice, since there have been situations where things have gone wrong when we arrived at the beach and zoo or waited for a bus to pick us up that hasn’t come. More recently we haven’t had these problems, as Sheen, also newly appointed has done a very good job at his responsibilities.
Sydney Burlew (8 years at camp) is a new chaperone, so her duties are various and have involved helping the lead chaperones with whatever they give her to do. She takes it all in stride, as it can be difficult not having a defined role and being expected to contribute so much of her time especially in that final week when she is all over the place helping everyone. “I don’t mind it so much since the camp is important to me since I’ve been coming here since I was 13 and am now 2o.”
Me, Andrew Gehm (14 years at camp), an assistant head chaperone and counsellor director has a fairly more relaxed final week. My duties involve making sure the counsellors arrive at the camp two hours prior to the campers and giving them their duties for the week. This is best worked out when they are able to attend the meetings, but counsellors are generally in high-schooland have a harder time getting to the meetings. During the final week I make sure they all know their duties and what is expected of them as the “middle-men” of the camp. Other than that I help Sheen and Rachel with any other tings they can’t get to and I arrive to the camp two days early to get things set up at the hotel and church.
The final week has us all running in every which direction, but is worth it after the camp is over when it all runs fairly smoothly. We’ve had a success for 20 straight years, and have since the new leadership has taken over this past year. We are currently working on our second year in charge of the camp and so far it’s all going well. It’s the first change-over of leadership for the camp and has went surprisingly smooth. We’ve made some changes, with a new marketing strategy to get the camp out there into the public eye to raise interest and attendance. Along with that, the last week confirmations and runaround are new, which helped last year with all activities going as planned without incident.
The upcoming Diocese of NJ Youth Choir Week is July 26th through 31st 2009, giving us seven more months to prepare for a hopefully successful camp. Without all these people’s due diligence in helping the camp … all as unpaid positions … we could have this camp and I personally thank them and so does the Diocese of NJ.
