My troop has attended several camps over the Northeast Region over the preceeding years, and we have spent several summers at Camp Schoellkopf in the Greater Niagara Frontier Council out of Buffalo NY. In the past this camp had a decent program, nice landscape, and generally good atmosphere. However over the past few years the quality of the staff has diminished greatly, which was one of the major attractions of this camp. They do not have very good waterfront activities (which our boys always look as a major attraction at a camp) they have tried several older boy programs, but all of them have met with little success. Their most recent older boy program involved older boy merit badges. I.e. eagle required badges that were meant for just the older scouts, but with no active screening process to keep younger boys out and these were badges not really appropriate for scout camp (The Cits, as well as First Aid and Communications). They had a really good younger boy program for a bunch of years, but then they changed the staff makeup and leadership of that program, and it too just seemed to go down hill.
Their COPE field is very nice, but highly understaffed and under utilized (2 staff members apparently with an average camp attendance of 1800 for the summer I'm told!!). Their Trading post has especially taken a dive over the past 3 years with very little merchandise, few new products, and by the time our troop got there near the end of the summer almost all products were sold out or had very few options available size wise, or color wise.
This past summer they apparently fired a good portion of their staff, with very few explanations that could stand up to scroutiny given, and had staff openly and actively bickering, complaining and pulling pranks on each other in open view of the scouts. I used to think this was a decent camp, but my troop is definetly not returning here any time soon, and will not return until we know for a fact that they have improved the quality of their camp.
There are a few other camps in the general area of Western New York, all roughly in the same state of decay, only Camp Merz has any redeeming value in that it has a nice beach front property on Lake Chataquatua (spelling???), a rather nice sized lake. But this camp has been plagued by bad staff and bad atmosphere as of late as well, so that gives it several negative aspects as well.
Camp Ditmer is not a bad camp, but I heard that they were not very loyal to even their long term resident troops, which makes us even more hesitant to camp there for any length of time.
Just wanted to let everyone know what is happening to the camps in Western New York. Anyone else have any good camps to go to in NY, or for that matter, to stay away from!!
