Eight year old JJ McCabe says if he was not at Pottsville Day Camp, he would be staying at home playing video games. Instead, he is spending his summer swimming, drawing, playing sports and having fun. He and about forty other kids in Pottsville, PA are campers at Pottsville Day Camp, a child care center and day camp that with the help of a government program, offers subsidies to local kids whose parents couldn’t otherwise afford to send them to summer camp. With funding from the state Dep’t of Welfare, the camp accepts payments as low as five dollars a week per child – that’s a hefty discount from the normal price of 100 dollars a week.

The LifeCenter Foursquare Gospel Church runs the camp. Pastor Ed Babcock says the church bought a new, bigger property and he wanted to put it to use to help the area’s kids. Pottsville is a hard hit town in this economic recession with many residents working in service industries.

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