Dear Mayor and City Council,
On Tuesday evening the 20th, new fees and fee increases for the Menlo Park after school child care and summer camp fees were discussed and voted on that day. There was no opposition from parents because none of the parents were notified that it was on the City Council agenda. I believe parents would have shown up if they had know about the meeting. I by chance happened to find out about the unanimous vote to raise the fees. Menlo Park Summer Camp fees appeared to be extremely low because the other camps that were compared to Menlo Park's camp were all PRIVATE camps. How come the fees were not compared to other local Cities? For example if you sign up for soccer at any local City, the fees runs approximately $45-65 per session per child. That is one of the benefits of living and paying taxes in your City. If you sign up for soccer through a Nike or Adidas camp taught by professional athletes, it would run you $150. Private camps such as Camp Galileo are specialty camps taught by college graduates, real teachers and museum educators. Teacher to child ratios are also lower such as 8:1 at. Children's Creative Learning Centers are also NAEYC accredited( National Academy for the Education of Young Children). Menlo Park City Council should be comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges when voting on fee increases. There are many variable on why other camps charge more.
By creating decreased hours it makes the fee appear to only have a 10% increase, but in reality it is a 40% increase in disguise. For more than 18 years the hours have always been 8AM-5:30 PM. Now by shortening the hours to 4 PM and creating a second tier of extended hours from 4-5:30 PM and charging an extra $200 per session on top of the increased camp fee is unfair to all hard working parents who work full time and rely on all day summer camps. Most parents do not ever see a raise of 10 to 40%. The justification for increasing fees for summer camps so steeply is because other local (PRIVATE) camps are charging much more is not a valid reason. I believe the gas in England is $5 or 6 a gallon does that mean everyone in the United States should pay that much? Should the oil companies hike the price up to match that of other countries? We should really do comparable fee increases to local cities and not PRIVATE ones. I am hoping that all council members open this discussion up again, reconsider lowering the increase to 5-10% overall for the entire camp with no second tier of extended camp hours payments. In the future, all parents should be notified when Council will be meeting on items relating to their children so that they have a chance to speak out.
Thank you for your time,
Donnie Sample
Parent
 

 
Received on Thu Mar 22 00:31:40 2007