By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
This year’s Sitka Fine Arts Camp has been canceled, due to concerns about COVID-19.
“With the pandemic crisis, we feel a strong sense of responsibility to keep our small community safe along with the communities our students and staff would return to,” Executive Director Roger Schmidt said in a letter he sent Monday to campers, staff and parents.
The announcement followed a decision by the SFAC board at its Saturday meeting.
“There’s a certain point that if we wait too long to make a decision it gets harder and harder to run a program and to cancel a program,” Schmidt said.
The summer camp runs from early June until late July, and includes sessions for young people from elementary through high school ages.
The board’s main concern, Schmidt said in an interview today, was how to run a program involving some 1,000 school-age kids, plus dozens of staff, without posing coronavirus risks to the campers, staff and families.
“We’ve been researching, and following the available research out there,” Schmidt said. “It was an emotional decision but it was not a hard one to make, in light of the facts we are facing in the world.”
Campers and staff members come to the fine arts camp from around the U.S. and Alaska, as well as from foreign countries.
“We feel such a responsibility to keep our community safe and to keep the communities the students and staff return to safe as well,” Schmidt said. “We don’t want to be in a position where the program will endanger this. COVID is incredibly contagious and when it spreads, it spreads exponentially. We haven’t seen any evidence it’s getting less potent. What we have seen is social distancing and sheltering in place are having an impact, and when you don’t do these things the virus goes back to spreading and being contagious and killing people.”
Middle school students play on the SJ quadrangle in June 2019 during a session of the Sitka Fine Arts Camp. On Saturday the board of directors of the camp decided to cancel summer programs in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
Schmidt said he and the staff and board members investigated various options for going forward, but with no new developments on the horizon – universal testing, a vaccine – they couldn’t see anything available that would make camp safe to conduct.
“All the evidence points to these things being a long ways off,” he said.
SFAC has already seen a drop in donations as an effect of the pandemic and the measures that have been taken to prevent its spread. Further financial losses will be suffered from not having revenue from camp stage shows during the summer.
Tuition is being returned, and while the camp is asking parents to consider donating to the camp, Schmidt said he and the board realize many are not in the position to do this because of the impact the pandemic is having on their own finances.
“(Canceling camp) comes at a cost to our organization,” he said. “This isn’t easy for us. It’s excruciating, it has an emotional and financial impact to our organization. We’re hoping in doing this it will encourage other organizations to make difficult choices to protect our community.”
Schmidt said he also realizes that the decision will have a big impact on the students who count on the camp every year for meaningful experiences, in addition to arts education.
“Our students tell us year after year that this is the most important event in their lives,” he said. “An adult can say wait till next year, and it’s not a big deal in our lives because we run at a different pace and milestones don’t happen on a yearly basis. But for a kid of 16 or 17 that’s when all these things are happening. Every event is a singular event. It’s a milestone in kids lives.”
