The role of counselors: ensuring a safe environment for campers

Overview

The counselor role at summer camp tends to be the most direct expression of how a program has thought about camper safety and wellbeing. In many programs, counselor selection, training depth, supervision structure, and retention across seasons tell parents more about the actual experience than the program website does.

What a counselor actually does across the day

A counselor's day starts before the cabin wakes up and ends after the last child is asleep. The visible parts of the role, leading an activity, running a meal table, organising a cabin clean-up, are the easier parts to describe. The less visible parts carry more weight. Noticing that a child has been quiet for two days in a row. Reading the social temperature of a cabin group before it tips into conflict. Knowing when to intervene in a peer situation and when to let children work something out.

Those judgments happen dozens of times across a session, in moments that never appear on a schedule. They depend on a counselor who has been prepared for them, not just for the activity delivery side of the job. Programs that describe training in terms of what counselors are taught to observe and respond to, rather than only what they are taught to run, are describing a different kind of preparation.

How counselors are selected and what that process involves

Background checks for camp staff are standard practice at established programs, but the scope of what is checked varies considerably. A check that covers criminal history in one jurisdiction is a different thing from one that checks across multiple states, includes reference verification, and involves a structured interview process. Asking specifically what the background check involves, who conducts it, and whether it is repeated for returning staff tends to produce more useful information than asking whether checks are done.

Reference checking is part of the selection process at programs that treat it seriously. A counselor reference call that asks specifically about how a candidate handles difficult children, conflict, and stress under pressure produces different information from one that confirms employment dates and general character. Programs that describe their reference process in any detail are usually describing a genuine screening effort.

What training looks like before the session begins

Pre-season training at established programs typically runs for a defined period before campers arrive. The length of training is less informative than what it covers. A training that spends the bulk of its time on activity delivery and logistics is preparing counselors for a different role than one that addresses how to handle a child who is refusing to participate, how to manage a cabin conflict at midnight, or what the legal obligations are when a child discloses something serious.

Mandatory reporting is one of the areas where training content matters most. Camp staff in most jurisdictions are classified as mandated reporters, meaning they have legal obligations to report suspected abuse or neglect to relevant authorities. A program that includes mandatory reporting in its pre-season training is describing a legal compliance baseline. A program that also describes how it supports staff through a reporting situation is describing something that goes beyond baseline.

Who supervises the counselors

A counselor who is not supervised is making every judgment call alone. The quality of the supervision structure above cabin staff is what determines whether problems surface early or late, whether a struggling counselor gets support before the situation affects campers, and whether the program maintains consistent expectations across a large staff team across the full length of a session.

The person directly above a cabin counselor, typically a unit leader, section head, or division director depending on the program, is the person who sees how the counselor is actually doing in the role. How frequently that person checks in with cabin staff, what those conversations cover, and whether there is a formal mechanism for counselors to raise concerns about situations in their cabin all shape how well the supervisory layer functions in practice.

Counselors-in-training and what their role actually is

Counselor-in-training programmes are a genuine and valuable part of how established camps develop their next generation of staff. A CIT is typically an older teenager who is learning the counselor role under supervision rather than holding it independently. That distinction matters when reading a program's stated ratio.

Whether a CIT is counted within the ratio varies by program and is worth asking directly. A cabin with a counselor and a CIT is a different environment from a cabin with two fully qualified counselors, even if the headcount is the same. Programs that describe how CITs are supervised and what responsibilities they hold versus what they observe are giving parents a more complete picture than those that list CIT presence without context.

A CIT who is well-supervised and genuinely learning adds something to a cabin environment. Older teenagers who have been through the program as campers bring a kind of peer credibility that adult counselors do not have. The question is not whether CITs are present but whether they are being supervised and whether their role has been defined clearly enough that neither they nor the campers in their cabin are placed in an ambiguous situation.

Questions parents commonly ask about camp counselors

Closing

The counselor is the program, in the most practical sense. Everything that happens in a session passes through the people living in the cabins with the children. How those people were chosen, what they were taught before they arrived, who checks in on them during the session, and whether they come back the following year, these details describe the actual quality of the experience more accurately than the activity list or the property photos do. Programs that can speak to those details specifically, rather than generally, are describing something they have thought about seriously.