Hands-on learning makes this summer program ‘Camp Cool’

Members of Camp Cool pose for a picture Saturday at Dr. Charles R. Drew Elementary School with former Drew special needs teacher Mark Bizokas (third row left), who has held the summer camp at the school grounds for the past five summers. Students are drawn to the program by Bizokas’ blend of hands-on engineering and design work, along with reading, math and computer classes throughout the week.

In five years of running Camp Cool, Howard County resident Mark Bizokas has overseen some big projects, such as helping youngsters build a hovercraft, pool table and dunk tank.

But the former elementary school teacher and father of two has even bigger plans: establishing his own private school, with an emphasis on education through practice, not merely theory.

At the camp’s premises at Dr. Charles R. Drew Elementary School in Silver Spring, nearly 50 campers, mostly from Montgomery County and ranging in age from 4 to 14, got to play sports, learn about computers and design and build their own craft projects.

For Bizokas, the key is letting the kids have fun while they’re learning.

‘‘One thing I like to do is get kids involved,” he said. ‘‘The one problem I have with regular education is the kids aren’t involved that much ... and every aspect of their day is so strictly scheduled.”

When he heard some of his campers wanted a dunk tank, Bizokas looked into renting one, and then decided that it would probably be easier and more rewarding to simply build one.

‘‘They proposed the ideas they thought were best and decided on what to do,” he said. ‘‘We got input from everybody, and problem-solving was a big part of it — such as how you build the drop mechanism.”

The camp’s hours officially ran 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., and included computer classes, math and reading, and a lot of sports and arts and crafts. Participants might be building a Web site in the morning and working on a construction project in the afternoon.

The math and reading classes were just enough to make sure children didn’t lose ground over the summer, but not so much so they felt like they were doing work, Bizokas said. Often, the lessons were disguised in other activities: a project to build a pool table led seamlessly into a lesson about geometry.

Many kids begged to stay late until the camp closed at 6 p.m., according to Silver Spring resident Judy Fabrikant.

Her younger son, Josh Waldman, loved it so much that he preferred it over the family’s vacation.

‘‘[Josh] was absolutely furious that we were going on vacation in the last week of camp,” Fabrikant said. ‘‘I drove four hours to bring Josh back from our vacation so he could attend the summer camp’s last barbecue.”

Bizokas, 33, had taught special needs classes at Drew for two years before committing to run Camp Cool full-time — he now works at Drew as a substitute teacher. Although the camp runs from June to August, Bizokas said the paperwork and preparations occupies him at least a month before and after the camp’s schedule. He handles applications, taxes, employment and other paperwork, which helps him tailor the camp to the needs of each student. Additionally, he gets help from fellow teachers at Drew and previous campers back as counselors.

In the off-season, in addition to substitute teaching at Drew, he also owns and runs a company that builds fences.

Although Camp Cool started as a summer job, Bizokas sees it more as a community resource; a ‘‘friends factory for kids.”

Parents, colleagues and students alike say the camp owes its success to Bizokas’ rapport with kids.

‘‘He makes every kid at the camp feel special,” said Barbara Gorin, a Colesville resident. ‘‘He gets a vision and makes it happen.”

Also, with a smaller student body than many camps, which often number more than 100 campers, Bizokas had the time to devote attention to each student.

‘‘When my son had to go to the hospital, Mark had written down everything I needed to know and even contacted the pediatrician before I got there,” Fabrikant said. ‘‘When I got back home, they’d made a ‘Welcome Back’ sign over the door, to make him smile.”

Teaching colleagues say Bizokas can connect with youths of all academic abilities. Kim Leichtling, a fourth-grade teacher at Drew who also helped out with Camp Cool, has had three children attend the camp. She said Bizokas’ patience and creativity were unusual by any standards.

‘‘At his camp, he tends to pool a lot of our Center [for Excellence] kids and also our special education kids, so they can appreciate the gifts they can bring together,” she said. ‘‘If he has a sulky kid, he’ll make time for them, problem-solving and giving options and choices in how to handle it in the future.”

The end result is a camp where everybody is friends with everybody else, and where Bizokas has had to raise the maximum age because kids have wanted to come back.

‘‘The kids feel so comfortable here — we don’t have fights, we don’t have kids picking on other kids,” he said. ‘‘My 4-year-old came, and I was a little afraid, but the older kids would take her along with them and she became the little sister of the camp.”

Bizokas’ experience with the camp is in preparation for his private school project. Currently in the fund-raising stage, Bizokas said the project has received encouraging responses from businesses. With an initial target age of grade 8 and above, Bizokas plans to move away from lectures and textbooks, and feature more hands-on work, with a strong emphasis on technology and business.

‘‘If you say, ‘This is what we’re doing, figure it out yourself,’ you’re teaching them how to solve problems, instead of just following directions,” he said. ‘‘I would like them to be involved with running their own small business: how to throw around ideas, then make ideas become reality.”

Bizokas sees his own work as a series of similar inspirations. He started Camp Cool simply as a summer job, then ended up giving up his teaching job to focus on it full-time. The craft projects started off as ideas from campers, who then went out and learned how to make them happen. The school grew out of his dissatisfaction with business courses at college.

‘‘I’m going to teach kids that it’s possible to realize good ideas, and you don’t need a billion dollars to do it,” he said.

Bizokas hopes to start in earnest by next year, but campers at Camp Cool are already in on the decision-making, such as what activities to include and where to build it.

‘‘He’s been very open about his school plans,” said Alex Beede, a sophomore at Montgomery Blair High School, about Bizokas. ‘‘He doesn’t like the memorizing of dates and things, he wants the school to feel like a big family, and he said every night they’re going to have a big dinner.”

Beede said the school is still being planned, but if Bizokas’ students have learned anything, it’s never to doubt what you can do.

‘‘Over the course of the camp, we made the dunk tank and pool table,” Beede said. ‘‘I would say there’s no way you can do this, it’s not gonna work, and he’s consistently proved me wrong all the time. A new school might just spring out of the ground — and it probably will.”

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