Three summers ago, Ed and Lauren Rimland arrived at Camp Ramapo to pick up their son Jake, who was then 10. He had spent three weeks at the sleep-away ca mp, and his parents were eager to see him.

An entirely unexpected event occurred on their arrival. “Another boy put his arm around my son and said, ‘He’s my friend,’” recalls Lauren Rimland. Both Ed and Lauren wept when they heard those simple words.

Jake, now 13, has an autism spectrum disorder, and it was the first time his parents had heard another child call Jake his friend.

The Rimlands’ experience at Camp Ramapo is not unique. Camp Ramapo, located on 250 wooded and natural acres in Rhinebeck, N.Y., was founded in 1922 for orphaned boys. In the early 1950s, the camp became co-ed and focused on serving at-risk children. In the 1970s, the camp gradually broadened its mission to include children with emotional, behavioral and learning disabilities.

As the number of children diagnosed with autism in the United States has grown, Camp Ramapo has adapted to give autistic children a successful summer experience, as typical as possible. The camp offers swimming (both pool and lake), hiking, arts and crafts, high and low ropes courses, boating, dance, theater and music.

Bernie Kosberg, executive director of Ramapo for Children, said that 20 percent of the 630 boys and girls ages 6 to 16 who attended camp last summer were on the autism spectrum. The majority of Camp Ramapo’s campers do not have autism; they have diagnosed emotional, behavioral or learning disabilities. At Camp Ramapo, unlike at many other camps or recreational programs, children with autism are not segregated. They participate in all activities and share cabins, called bunks, with their fellow campers and counselors.

“The experience of the children with autism here puts them with the highest functioning kids they may be in contact with all year,” said Mike Kunin, associate director. Over its eight-week summer, divided into three sessions, the camp provides a one-to-one staff to child ratio. The camp’s staff and counselors encourage every camper, on the spectrum or not, to get involved and take risks.

“When exposed to a variety of social situations, children with autism build social skills they otherwise may not acquire,” wrote Dr. Ann Mastergeorge, a developmental and educational psychologist at the University of California at Davis who also conducts research on autism at the M.I.N.D. Institute in California.

A Culture of Inclusion

Camp Ramapo strives to create what Dr. Mastergeorge calls “a culture of inclusion.” The camp’s staff and counselors facilitate interaction between children with developmental disabilities and neurotypical campers. The campers with other disabilities are taught that children with autism are trying to join in and that those efforts should be encouraged and welcomed, not simply tolerated. Children on the spectrum are prompted to participate and are cheered on when they do.

“It’s the mix that works,” said Lauren Rimland, who learned about Camp Ramapo from a friend. “The kids with behavioral problems nurture our kids.” At camp, when her son Jake sings aloud, his bunkmates join in. If he gets rolling on a video script that he has memorized, other campers participate and call out the lines with him.

“Our children,” Lauren Rimland said, “are not always able to reach out. If you put kids with autism together, no one will reach out. But the other kids at Camp Ramapo do reach out, and our kids respond however they can.”

“We use a special approach for all kids,” Kosberg said. “Every moment in the day is an opportunity to teach a new skill.” He emphasized that the most important skill the camp teaches its campers is how to ask for help, rather than to act out when they confront problems.

At camp, Jake, who is described by his mother as moderately high functioning, learned to take a shower by himself and to set the table for meals with other campers. “It never would have occurred to me to have Jake set the table at home,” Lauren Rimland said. “Now it’s his job, and he gets an allowance for it.”

“We believe that the road to self-esteem is through skill building,” Kunin said.

The camp assesses where a child is and sets individual goals for each child at his or her level.

“At other places, they’re always putting a ceiling on physical activities because your child is developmentally disabled,” Lauren Rimland said. “It’s so frustrating. Jake can ride a bike, snow ski and skate. At Ramapo, they help these children do.”

John DiStasio, a behavioral interventionist in New York City, refers families of children with autism to Camp Ramapo because the mix of kids there and the one-to-one staff to camper ratio work well.

“Most of these kids have never been away from home,” DiStasio said. “At Camp Ramapo they can feel normal, run around, and jump in a pool. Just because they have autism doesn’t mean they can’t have fun.”

Bernardo Pacé has seen the culture of inclusion at Camp Ramapo help his daughter Gina, 15, connect with her peers. Pacé heard of Camp Ramapo through his autism support network, and Gina has spent part of her past five summers there.

Gina, who reads on a third-grade level, has a tremendous receptive vocabulary, but her expressive language is limited, according to Pacé. She does not interact with others in a purposeful way, so when campers and counselors do not know her well, they do not understand how much she comprehends.

“At home she has us trained,” Pacé said. “But at camp, she has to exert herself.” He said that other non-autistic campers become her protectors at Camp Ramapo. “She moves around in a little pack, which is nice to see.”

Teaching Children with Autism

Pacé, an English professor at the City University of New York, also serves as a coach to Camp Ramapo’s young counselors (most are in their late teens or early twenties) because, he said, “Bernie Kosberg has recognized that a different choreography is needed for kids with autism.”

Pacé has found that young counselors often are more attuned and oriented to kids with emotional issues and need help adjusting and responding to the needs of children with autism. Pacé helps camp staff turn general guidelines for educating children with autism into workable strategies for Camp Ramapo counselors.

“Osmosis is not automatic for kids who have autism,” Pacé advises them. He finds that the camp’s young counselors are not always comfortable with the direct, emphatic, repetitive language that the children with autism need to splice them into activities with other campers, and encourages them to use it.

Pacé also has given the camp specific suggestions to help its campers with autism participate more fully, such as:

• Reduce downtime between activities because the unstructured time frequently poses a challenge for children with autism.

• Use pictures to ensure that children whose receptive language is limited understand the choices being offered to them.

• Use “photo menus” to help the children understand how to participate in activities; for example, to show how to use clay in pottery.

Pacé meets with counselors in small groups to answer their specific questions about campers with autism as well. Last summer, one little boy scratched himself repeatedly. Pacé advised the counselors to let him carry a milk crate around during the day filled with some of his favorite things, and the scratching ended.

Pacé also observed that counselors and neurotypical campers needed help understanding the difference between a child’s expressive and receptive language. Last summer, he took his laptop to Camp Ramapo and used it to type questions for his daughter. She typed her answers in response and surprised her counselors with her vocabulary and level of understanding, so Pacé decided to show her bunkmates as well.

Pacé typed questions, and Gina answered. Her bunkmates took the laptop away from her father and began to ask Gina questions directly: “What is your favorite color?”

Gina typed, “My favorite color is red.”

The girls hugged and clapped for Gina, and she responded to them. She hugged them and smiled. “She made intense eye contact with each one of them, making the moment the most intense, socially related experience I have witnessed outside the family circle,” Pacé wrote about the interaction between Gina and her bunkmates.

Learning New Things

Pam Donlan’s 16-year-old son Matt, who has pervasive developmental delays, has attended Camp Ramapo for the past two summers. She found the camp through an Internet search. She liked the camp’s policy of bunking kids with autism with at-risk campers and observed that the camp could handle behaviors that other camps could not.

“Ramapo doesn’t shy away from children with difficult behaviors—aggression, lack of self-control or tantrums,” Donlan said.

After his first summer experience at Ramapo, Donlan noticed that her son had become less anxious, more cooperative and showed better self-control. This past year, Matt also participated in Ramapo’s year-round program.

Ramapo offers both spring and fall weekends when parents can stay at the camp with their children. Teenagers can attend a regular family weekend or a leadership weekend for their age group. About 10 percent of Ramapo’s campers return each year as staff, after they have completed the teen leadership program and worked during the summer program as interns.

Last November, Pam and Matt Donlan spent the teen leadership weekend together at the camp. When the families broke into morning workshop groups, the Donlans took part in a two-hour seminar led by Kunin. The group wrote down and discussed answers to questions Kunin posed such as: “What is your favorite time of day and why?” and “What three words would you want others to use in describing you?”

“I don’t know if he could have sat through a workshop a year ago,” Donlan said about Matt.

Later in the afternoon, Matt stood beneath a log lashed like a balance beam between two trees about 25 feet off the ground. A staff member and his mother buckled a safety harness on him. Although eager to tackle the physical challenge, Matt became agitated as he waited for his turn. He paced, loped about and roughly hugged trees. But when his turn came, he nimbly climbed the ladder up to the log and inched smoothly across it. As the staff lowered him gently back down to the ground, Matt called out exultantly, “Mom, look at me!”

Theresa Ogden’s son Blaze, 9, has attended Camp Ramapo for the past three summers. Camp bridges the gap when he is on vacation from his 11-month school program for children with autism.

Ogden panicked three years ago when she realized that Blaze, who is considered high functioning, needed care and attention for four weeks every year when both she and her former husband would be at work. She heard about Ramapo at a birthday party, but she was unsure about sending her son to an overnight camp. She thought he was too young.

Ogden took Blaze to see the camp. She was amazed that her son, then 5, walked away from her, holding another child’s hand, and played on the camp playground.“This year,” Ogden said, “a counselor called me after one week to tell me how much progress she’d seen in Blaze since last summer—he was more social with fewer bad behaviors.” Ogden was pleased that the counselor, who had not seen Blaze for a year, took note of and cared about the positive changes in her son.

Last summer, Ogden wanted the camp to help Blaze continue work on two goals. First, she wanted him to eat a wider variety of foods. She was delighted to learn from his counselors that he ate waffles for the first time. She also hoped that Blaze would become more social.

“When I picked him up, he actually introduced me to one of the other boys,” Ogden said. “Typically, he would want to be by himself, not involved with other kids.” Now, Ogden has enrolled Blaze in a regular bowling league. She said that after he takes a turn he gives people high fives.

“It was hard to leave him at camp when he was younger,” Ogden said. “Now it’s good for everybody to have a break, and with other people he starts to do things that he may not do at home with us.”

A Trip to the Country

Rima Ritholtz is the principal of Public School 176X in New York City. The New York State Education Department identifies the school as one of only five schools in the state with effective practices in instructional programs for school age students with autism.

Ritholtz worked as a counselor at Camp Ramapo when she was a teenager. “I can’t say enough about what a wonderful place Camp Ramapo is for teaching about giving,” Ritholtz said.

For the past five years, students, parents, teachers and staff from P.S. 176X have taken a day trip to Camp Ramapo in May. Last spring, 60 students accompanied by 60 parents and staff drove from the Bronx up the Hudson Valley to the camp. The families and school personnel hike, bike, try the low ropes course and share a barbecue.

“Some of our kids and parents,” Ritholtz said, “have never been out of the city. It’s an uplifting, positive day for everyone.” She is working with New York City to try to expand the day at Camp Ramapo into an overnight program and seeking scholarship funds for her students to attend the camp during the summer.

Jesse Mojica and his son, Adam, age 8, took the day trip to Camp Ramapo with the school group last year. Mojica, director of education and youth services in the Bronx borough president’s office, said that Adam is severely affected, without any expressive language.

“We [the parents of children with autism] spend a lot of time trying to fit our kids into activities, instead of participating in activities suited to our children,” Mojica said. “When we arrived at Camp Ramapo and got off the bus, there were beautiful people waiting to greet us with smiles on their faces.”

Mojica described the day as a “freeing event” when he did not need to worry about explaining that Adam might have a tantrum or grab someone.

“I’m usually trying with all my heart to figure out if Adam is happy,” Mojica said, but he did not have to guess how Adam felt last May on the low ropes course at Camp Ramapo. Adam, who does not usually relate to others, smiled when the group of students, teachers, parents and Camp Ramapo staff cheered for him as he tried to balance.

Ray Segal’s son Oscar, 11, has attended Camp Ramapo for the past five years. Segal wrote a summary of the impact
of the camp on his son’s life:

“Summer at Ramapo is the only time of year that Oscar gets to spend a lot of time around typically developing peers—and a group of enthusiastic counselors who are barely out of adolescence themselves. Every summer Oscar comes home having a lot more of the kinds of knowledge that typically developing kids share, the kinds of things—like popular music and language—that bind them together as a generation and friends. It’s the kind of experience that can’t be replicated during the school year in a classroom where all the other kids are usually also segregated from the outside world and lack much experience with peer social relationships.”

The values of the Ramapo community, which are discussed by all campers with their counselors in their bunks at the start of each session, define its culture of inclusion.

Dr. Mastergeorge, who describes herself as a strong proponent of inclusion, emphasized that creating a culture of inclusion not only helps children with developmental disorders, but “others involved become more empathic and inclusive citizens,” she said.

Ellen Lieberman has been chair of the Friends of Public School 169 in New York City for the past four years. The school serves a population of severely emotionally challenged students and those with autism, and the nonprofit friends group raises funds for tutoring, holiday parties and gifts, and camp scholarships.

Three years ago, the group began sending its students with autism to Camp Ramapo with its emotionally challenged students. In their school environment, the two groups do not often interact.

“Our kids, mostly boys, are very angry, very sullen,” Lieberman said. “One of our students with autism shared a bunk with two of our emotionally disturbed boys. They became his friend, his voice, his advocate. When I visited, I saw this. I was blown away; it was so beautiful.”

For more information:
Ramapo for Children’s Rhinebeck Campus is located in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. Visit their website at www.ramapoforchildren.org.

Ramapo Training was established to provide staff training and program support for educational and recreational programs, especially those that serve children-at-risk and those with special needs.