Summer Camp Experience Leads to Potential Career in Special Education for Matthew Kylin

Matthew Kylin: "Working at camp was the first time I realized that, yes, I definitely want to be a teacher. It wasn't just a childhood fantasy." (Provided photo)

A summer job can be more than just a means for a high school or college student to earn extra cash. It can also offer a young person the opportunity to explore a potential career path.

That was certainly the case for Roland Park resident Matthew Kylin, a 2021 graduate of the George Washington Carver Center for Arts and Technology. Jmore recently spoke with Kylin, who attends the University of Connecticut, about how the three summers he spent working as a counselor for children with special needs at J Camps’ inclusion program at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore inspired him to pursue a career in special education.

Jmore: What made you decide to become an inclusion counselor?

MK: One of my best friends had worked at the JCC as a bunk counselor, but then she realized the following summer she wanted to be an inclusion counselor. Throughout the year leading up to the next summer, she told me all of these stories and showed me pictures of the kid I ended up working with my first summer. And I was like, ‘Wow, this sounds really cool. I kind of want to do this.’ So I met with [J Camp director of inclusion] Helene Rapaport and realized this was something I wanted to do.

How did the JCC prepare you to work with children with disabilities?

There was a week or a week-and-a-half-long orientation where we worked with Helene and the rest of the camp leadership team. We learned procedures, protocols, schedule stuff. As inclusion counselors, we had a separate training where we started learning the basics.

But a lot of [the learning] is jumping in because as much training as you can go through, it really depends on the kid. And we did talk to Helene about our individual kid. We met with her one on one and went through the camper profile to learn [things like] this kid wears AFOs [ankle-foot orthoses] and you need to make sure to put them on. Or [this kid] needs help changing or wears a diaper. … It was informative and helpful but a lot of it was just figuring it out as you go, which was terrifying because I don’t like being in that kind of situation.

That was actually where I realized, ‘Wait, I can do this!’ If I were to do my first summer over again, I would definitely do a lot differently just because I have more experience and more knowledge now. I’m not 16 anymore. But I think overall, it was very solid.

What was your first summer like?

I started at camp when I was going into my junior year of high school, and the first summer I was with the same kid for the entire summer. He was a second grader. I knew I wanted to be a teacher since I was seven. But working at camp was the first time I realized that, yes, I definitely want to be a teacher. It wasn’t just a childhood fantasy.

I also realized I wanted to be a special education teacher. That wasn’t something I knew beforehand. My camper had Down syndrome and he needed quite a bit of support. I still follow his mom on Instagram and see how much he’s been growing. And it makes me emotional because, oh my gosh, he’s getting so old!

[At first] he didn’t know how to participate with his peers, and his peers didn’t really know how to interact with him because he was pretty much non-verbal and had a lot of mobility issues. The most memorable thing about that summer was when he did the zipline. He had been going to the camp since preschool and his mom really wanted him to do the zipline, but he was scared of it. I remember telling his mom about it and how excited she was and how much he loved it. He wanted to go on it every day afterwards. I could literally talk for hours about every memory I have of camp.

How about the second summer?

By the end of my first summer, I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got this.’ And then the second summer was COVID, so that was a complete 180 from the first summer I worked there. Everything was different.

I was with a completely different kid and I was like, ‘Wait, I have to learn literally everything because they had different needs.’ He has autism and he was very, very talkative. That [summer] was eye-opening to me because I realized I was good at this but also that it was something that I loved. [My new camper] needed support, but I got to see how much growth he had with interacting with his peers, which was a really special thing for me. And that’s something I’ve witnessed every summer since my first summer, and think it is partially because I knew more about what I was doing. I actually had knowledge about how to make sure his peers were interacting with him and he was interacting with his peers.

Last summer?

I was kind of everywhere doing everything. I was with a bunch of different kids, which was a completely different experience. But it also showed me how, regardless of what kid I was working with, everyone benefited from being in the bunk with their classmates and peers.

The biggest thing I’ve learned through camp was that I really want to work in a space where [students with disabilities are not always segregated from their peers], where we’re really making sure they’re getting all of the same opportunities and they’re being able to grow in the same way that their peers are being supported to be able to grow.

The most standout memory in terms of that was the kid I was with for half of the summer. He was also autistic and in second grade. His parents told me he had never had a playdate. Pretty soon after I started working with him, he and this one boy in his bunk got very close and had a playdate outside of camp. I sobbed when I found out about it. That’s a perfect representation of how I’ve seen these kids benefit from camp. They’re growing, and not in a way where they’re forced to act like their peers but in a way where they’re able to be themselves.

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