About Our Tuition
Several years ago, a parent posted on Fiddleheart’s Facebook page, “Well, for that price, it better be real magic!” I was struck by how this parent probably felt frustrated at the cost of summer camp and I offered to get on the phone to explain what makes Fiddleheart so special. By including this page on our website, it is my hope to provide an explanation of why Fiddleheart tuition costs what it does and how Fiddleheart is uniquely different from other summer camps.
Our Staff:
Age, Experience & Wages: The majority of our full-time and guest staff members are highly experienced adult professionals, working as longtime theatre artists in Philadelphia, New York and around the country. Many are also professional teaching artists. At Fiddleheart, we believe that these very skilled adults, who bring their hard-earned skills and immense creative gifts to Fiddleheart deserve a living wage. Many other summer camps hire high school and college students as counselors and pay their staff minimum wage or even less (depending on the state laws around ‘seasonal help’). We hire enough staff members to have a staff to student ratio that is about 1 to 6. Paying our quality staff members is the most expensive aspect of running Fiddleheart. We are dedicated to paying our brilliant professors the best that we can (though the headmistress insists they do deserve more) and thus would never want to try to cut costs through lowering our employee wages or hiring less seasoned and talented people.
Our Size:
We are a tiny summer camp. We are only running ONE 2-week session per summer compared to many other camps who run 7-9 weeks. Also, we can only accommodate a fraction of the number of students that other camps do. Our total student body is around 50 per session while other camps enroll 100-600 per week. When it comes to running the business of camp, a professional lawyer and camp director told me, “It’s all about the number of campers~the more the better- and after a certain number it’s almost all profit.” This is because the baseline cost of running a camp is high but doesn’t increase that much per student, thus more students are better for the bottom line of the business. Our current infrastructure and camp programing does not allow us to take 100 or 150 students at Fiddleheart in a single session. And we don’t want to. If we chose to increase our numbers not only would our class sizes be much larger but the intimacy of the experience would change entirely. By keeping our numbers small, all the students and staff members know each other. We are able to meet together as a whole school several times a day and we truly feel that we are part of an integrated and intimate community. One important value that we communicate every year at Fiddleheart is that we must work together as a whole school to face our challenges. True, doubling our student body would allow us to lower the cost of attending but would then make it impossible for us to create a community ethos and adventure storyline in which the entire school could participate meaningfully together.
Our Adventure:
One of the unique hallmarks of Fiddleheart is that it is not only a summer camp but an immersive, live-action theatrical event. That means that our professors not only teach classes and lead activities, as do all camps, but they creatively adapt everything they are teaching to align with the magical world in which the students are living at Fiddleheart. This involves an enormous amount of talent and creativity, and requires meticulous planning AND in-the-moment improvising to bring our fantasy world elements to life. However that is not all. The students also participate in an unfolding theatrical adventure where magical creatures arrive on the grounds, or potions go awry, or professors have mysterious illnesses that must be cured and -of course- a mystery that must be solved. What this means is that not only is Fiddleheart a highly imaginative and hands-on summer camp but it is also a two-week theatrical event where the staff are acting in a pretend world and inviting the students into this world every day, all day long. The students are living inside a theatrical production and this production is also highly influenced by what the students bring daily to this magical story. At Fiddleheart, we are doing two highly demanding jobs at one time to create the magic that our students and families love so much. No one is doing what Fiddleheart is doing with the kind of expertise, care and attention to detail that we are.
Our Environmental Ethics:
It is difficult to run a business of any kind without incurring environmental harm. At Fiddleheart, through our storylines, we often explore a magical version of real world concerns such as climate change. We make an effort to include environmental stewardship into our programming. In keeping with this, when purchasing supplies for our activities, we make a concerted effort to minimize garbage and plastic. That means when we have a choice between a plastic potion bottle and a glass one, we always choose glass. When we could just use plastic spoons and throw them away, we choose to purchase stainless steel spoons and wash them to reuse. We try to purchase supplies from local vendors when available. Obviously, we cannot do this exclusively. Our world is simply not set up to make these choices possible when running a summer camp for youth. However, we are dedicated to putting in the time, effort and extra cost it takes to make these kinds of choices and minimize our environmental harm as much as possible.
Our Wands:
We don’t give our students a t-shirt and a plastic string bag when they come to Fiddleheart. That is for summer camp. We are a school of witchcraft and wizardry. Naturally, our students need wands and other important magical supplies. On the first day of school, at the Question Market, each of our 1st-year students is given a one-of-a-kind, hand made wand. This wand is something that becomes very special and personally meaningful to the students over the two weeks they are with us. This wand is also a work of art that costs $50 or more if purchased on our Etsy shop. It would be easy to purchase 100 plastic, identical wands made overseas for pennies. However, at Fiddleheart, the headmistress personally makes all of the wands so that each student feels that not only are they special but that their wand is something unique to them. As mentioned above, this is the kind of attention to detail, care and quality that is not found at any other summer camp.
Financial Aid:
We are very aware that for some families the cost of Fiddleheart is out of reach and that some families require a payment plan. From our beginning, we have offered both financial assistance and payment plans to any family that needs it. We don’t ask a lot of questions, we simply ask that if you need financial assistance, you reach out to the headmistress at headmistress@fiddleheartmagic.com or 917-687-1859.
We only charge what we must to keep Fiddleheart thriving. It’s that simple.