Despite graduating approximately 65 students this academic year, Lutheran High School welcomes over 1,300 campers from July through August for its “LuHi” summer day camp.
“It’s a pretty small school, but it’s a very big camp,” said Jason Wass, the camp’s director. Wass began at the camp as a counselor in the late ’90s and worked at multiple other camps before returning to LuHi in 2020.
The camp has been around since 1961, and for over 50 years, basketball was its most popular program offered, Wass said. Beginning in 2021, however, that changed with the introduction of “LuHi Country Day.”
Wass said the country day camp is most similar to a “traditional” day camp experience that introduces campers to everything LuHi has to offer, including STEM, arts, recreation and athletics.
“It’s the epicenter of what we do,” he said. Wass said the program allows campers to “branch into” different areas of interest in the future.
While LuHi Country Day Camp is the most traditional of the programs LuHi offers—similar to its neighbors Shibley, Pierce, and North Shore Day Camp—what makes LuHi unique is its focus on different specialties, Wass said.
For those interested in athletics, the camp offers two-week programs specializing in a range of sports, from basketball and tennis to fencing and cheerleading, Wass said. For those interested in STEM, Wass said the camp offers GIFT, which stands for Great Ideas For Tomorrow. For those who like the arts, there are theater, dance and fashion design programs as well.
“You can be very hyper-focused on something…I think that that serves as our uniqueness,” he said.
Wass said many families that send their children to camp enroll each child in different programs, allowing everyone to explore their different interests in the same place.
“That means that that family gets to be at one camp, and each family member gets to have unique experiences. For me, that’s really rewarding,” he said.
Wass said the camp is operating at a higher enrollment rate than in the pre-Covid era, and that one of the most popular places campers hail from is Port Washington, drawing approximately 250 campers each day.
Although the camp is located in the heart of Brookville, it attracts campers from over 60 towns in the region, creating a lot of diversity among the campers. Wass said the camp spans three boroughs: Queens, Nassau and Suffolk.
“We feel like we truly have a diverse mix of camp offerings, camp staff and campers,” he said.
