TLDR: Do not send your child to Camp Vertical Extreme at Rockford Christian School if they have trouble regulating their emotions. My son has had some emotional regulation issues since just before the pandemic (which of course made everything worse). His last pre-school deployed various tools and strategies over two years to help him and saw a lot of success, and unfortunately some failure. We've also taken him to therapy to give him some tools to deal with his big emotions (HUGE believer in therapy over here). It's an ongoing parenting process that I feel woefully unequipped to deal with, but I muddle through and try to make the best choices. At the beginning of June, we started him at a new Summer Camp to try and give him a more physical outlet for all of his energy. We made the mistake of not mentioning the emotional regulation issues we'd been working on with him because we figured if it came up, we would address it with them then. We wanted to avoid him being labeled as a problem child from the get-go, but I think this decision ended up hurting us and also him. Anyways, there was some trouble about a couple of weeks ago and he was sent home because he lost it in a classroom and ended up breaking a desk and making a huge mess. After this, we spoke with the director of the camp. This was the beginning of our very negative interactions with this person. She was combative during all conversations we had with her and continually brought the conversation back to how our child had acted and not how we could problem-solve to move forward. After an unbearably long conversation that my husband had with her, we felt like there was a plan in place for when another situation came up. Fast forward to today, I received a message about an hour after I dropped him off letting me know that I would have to come and pick him up. I asked what happened and she said that he scratched another child. When I got there I received a few more details about the altercation. When I had a chance to speak with my son, he filled in more details for me. Everything he said matched up with what two administrators of the camp shared with me at the door. He just had more information. We learned there was more to the altercation than we were told. At this point, I was still very much on the side of our son having lost his cool around adults who were acting appropriately. My husband called the camp to speak with the adults involved. The first person he spoke to was very combative and again kept focusing on how well she knew her job and how badly our son had acted. My husband continually tried to redirect the conversation to find a way to move forward that worked for everyone but this woman just yelled at him and got more and more agitated. My husband asked to speak with the director of the camp and this woman told him no because she was "handling it". She also laughed at him when he tried to end the conversation. He called the school back to speak with the director directly but had to leave a message. A short while later, the director called back. She had the same combative attitude and did not care at all about the details of the altercation with the children and what led up to the meltdown. All she cared about was that my son had kicked her and scratched her while she was physically removing him from the situation. This was the first we had heard about them laying their hands on him. This specific admission was very telling about how poorly these supposedly well-trained adults had handled a 5-year-old's meltdown. We later learned from our son that the adults had twisted his arms together and held him in place as well as his legs. This was after they had already removed him from the situation. This is a completely unacceptable way to treat a child who is in distress. Any basic childcare curriculum should have taught them that. Certainly, 30 years running a camp for children should teach better compassion and care. Long story long, my child is now no longer welcome at the camp on the days where they take field trips (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), which is basically useless to full-time working parents. The reasoning they gave is because he could create an unsafe situation for the other children. They inexplicably kept mentioning that he might run into the street... Really what they need to say is that they do not have the resources or education necessary to care for a 5-year-old who's learning to regulate his emotions (which should scare every parent considering sending their child to this camp). With a ratio of about 5 to 1, there is absolutely no reason they should not be able to help him. I could not be more disappointed in these adults who are tasked with caring for children, no matter what their emotional state is. read more