Arts Camp Signups Pour In; Campus Phone-Free

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Created on Thursday, 09 January 2025 14:56

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By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
    Sign-ups for the 2025 Sitka Fine Arts Camp sessions, which always start at midnight New Year’s Eve, came in fast and furious as the new year dawned last Wednesday, with 221 campers signed up in the first 15 minutes.
    Camp officials said that within the next four days, the elementary camp was full, with 187 kids registered and a waiting list forming.

Sitka Fine Arts Camp’s elementary school camp students arrive on campus
in 2022. (Sentinel File Photo by James Poulson)

    “It’s worth getting on the wait list, so when we know what space is available we’ll register more students,” said SFAC program director Kenley Jackson. Some spaces are held for scholarship students, and generally the wait list has about 225 names.
    The summer arts camps, listed by the school grade recently completed, are Elementary Camp, grades K-5, June 9-13; Middle School Camp, grades 6-8, June 15 through 28; High School Camp, grades 9-12, June 29-July 13; and Musical Theater Camp, eighth grade through freshman year of college, July 14-Aug. 3.
    In a tradition going back years, parents and students will stand by to hit the “register here” button on their smartphones or computers in the last seconds of the old year in order to be in the first wave of sign-ups received at the SFAC office in Sitka. The prize is bragging rights, since there are no advantages gained from registering first.
    By Wednesday the registered enrollment for all sessions was 534. In addition to the 87 signed up for the elementary student day camp, there is an even mix for middle- and high school-age sessions. Sign-ups for musical theater camp are generally slower, but the camp does fill up by the time auditions and rehearsals are held in late July, camp officials said.
    The musical theater camp production will be “The SpongeBob Musical,” which ran for a year on Broadway and had a popular national tour that was curtailed by the start of COVID. The show was nominated for 12 Tony Awards. The musical is based on the popular animated kids cartoon show, “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
    Zeke Blackwell, director of the musical theater camp, said the show is family-friendly, with a solid message about community, inclusion and “being true to your weird self.” The SFAC theater program is designed for those who want to act or take part in parallel programs for costume design and technical theater.
    “Seems like people are excited,” Blackwell said about the response to this year’s theater camp. He also teaches Shakespeare as well as acting and directing at elementary, middle and high school camps.
    SFAC Director Roger Schmidt said the camp has seen an increase in people coming from out of town for elementary camp, attracted mostly by word of mouth from families who came to previous camps. The elementary-age sessions are a day camp, so the kids stay with their parents at a hotel, B&B, on campus or with friends. During the day, the adults spend their free time vacationing, working remotely, or combining the two.
    “It’s a wonderful way for the kids to have something to do in the morning that’s independent and exciting at camp, and then they get to spend time with their parents in the afternoon,” Schmidt said. “Sometimes we think so much about the day tourists that we forget all the offerings we have for independent travelers that spend a longer time in Sitka.”
    One change this year is a new cell phone policy on campus: namely, having the campus “cell-phone-free” at all times.
   Schmidt said he’s heard from youth camps across the country that with kids spending time on their phones there has been “a loss in the feeling of community-building that’s happening.”
    “We’re excited about this change because everything we’ve read, the research we’ve done, we’re expecting (SFAC) camps will be building that much richer of a community,” he said.
    Schmidt said that in re-imagining its best practices policy, the Fine Arts Camp considered “what the personal growth experience can be through camp, obviously also with great arts classes. We think it’s going to be a really, really great experience, we’re super excited to watch it play out.”
    He said his team is going into the 2025 season “reinvigorated.”
    “The pandemic had a long tail to it, and it certainly had a huge impact on how we do things,” he said. “It’s great to examine  what we learned through that but it’s also great to move our energy toward: ‘what makes you feel connected, what makes you feel part of the community.’ We’ve been really thinking about those things this fall, really thinking about the core values of the camp, and how we can move those values forward.”