Summer Camps Ohio

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About this site

What is this site, and what is it not?

It is a planning guide for parents and other adults who are choosing a summer camp in Ohio. It gathers what state law, the IRS, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC and camp operators say, and sets it out so you can compare and ask better questions.

It is not a rating service. We have not visited, inspected, rated, ranked or endorsed any camp. We never call a camp safe, because we have no way of knowing. A camp is named here because its own page could be read and quoted, and for no other reason. We publish no reviews, and we never charge a camp for a listing or a correction.

How is it made?

Every sentence that states a fact about a camp, a rule, a price or a date is a quotation, shown in quotation marks with a link to the page it came from. Before each update a script fetches again every source it is able to fetch, with a User-Agent that names this site, and checks each quotation from those sources word for word. A fetched source that does not load counts as unverified, and the site is not rebuilt until every quotation from it is confirmed or removed. Three pages refuse scripts and are handled differently, as described under “Which pages could we not read?” below: their quotations are matched to a dated record of a browser reading, and they drop off the site when that reading runs out. The last full check was November 11, 2026, covering 304 quotations from 67 pages.

Our own sentences introduce the quotations, say what we did not find, and make suggestions, which are labelled as ours.

How are years handled?

Several of the pages we read still printed last season’s year, and some lines print no year at all. So a fact is labelled with a year only when the quoted words themselves print that year. A year printed somewhere else on the page is never borrowed. Every other line is labelled as printing no year, and you get the date we read it instead.

Which pages could we not read?

Some websites refuse automated readers. We do not disguise our reader or work around a refusal; we leave the page out and say so. That is why this site has no quotations from the YMCA of Greater Cincinnati or Camp Wise. The law itself is quoted from codes.ohio.gov, which is the state’s publication of it.

Three pages on sites like that were read another way: the publisher opened them in an ordinary web browser on November 11, 2026, one page each from the American Camp Association, the Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Department of Children and Youth, and the sentences we quote were recorded then with their addresses. Our script cannot repeat that reading, so we give it a shelf life: 45 days, through December 26, 2026. After that date the pages hide those passages in your browser and show a notice in their place, and the next build of the site removes them unless the pages have been read again. Each such quotation is marked “read in a browser” with the date. Nothing else from those three sites is quoted.

What do the filters do?

As a backstop, the build runs word filters over our own sentences. They stop the build on wording that would claim a check on a camp, call a camp safe, rank camps or offer reviews, and on any year outside a quotation, a date label or the name of the season being planned. A separate list holds every quotation that contains a word like “safe” or a staffing ratio, each with the reason it was accepted. Filters catch careless edits. They do not replace reading the page.

Sources

Photos and fonts

The photographs are old ones and are not of any camp named on this site. None shows a present-day child. Each caption quotes the description and the rights line from the photograph’s file page on Wikimedia Commons, and those quotations are checked by the same script as the rest. Credits: National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress; National Photo Company Collection, Library of Congress; Mennonite Church USA Archives; Mennonite Church USA Archives.

Fonts: Grandstander and Figtree, under the SIL Open Font License (notice, notice).

Corrections

Spot a mistake, or a quotation that has changed at the source? Email hello@summercampsohio.com with the page and a link to the correct information. Camp operators are welcome to write too. We fix verified errors and never charge for a listing or a correction.

There is no form on this site, on purpose. Please do not send us anything about a child: no names, ages, photographs, health details or schools. We don’t need them to fix a page, and we don’t want to hold them. We can’t take complaints about a camp or pass them on. For a concern about a child’s welfare at a camp, Ohio’s day camp registration law names the county children services agency and the county health department (quoted on the registration page); in an emergency call 911.

Who makes this?

Summer Camps Ohio is published by North Coast AI LLC in Ohio. It was built with AI assistance and reviewed by Bill Burkey. It is not affiliated with any camp, with the State of Ohio, the IRS, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC or the American Camp Association.

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