Sara Krueger Shaw has dedicated her life to serving youth and promoting Camp Alexander.
After many years, it’s time for Shaw, executive director of Camp Alexander, to move along to another camp, White Memorial near Council Grove.
Shaw has transformed Camp Alexander into what it is today — a place for youth and adults alike to enjoy everything from summer camps and day camps to team-building exercises through rope courses. Shaw started out as a summer camp director for the Emporia Recreation Commission in 1997. In that same year she was hired by Camp Alexander. She moved through the ropes from camp coordinator to director to her current position, executive director.
Shaw’s love for camp began when she was 12 and attended her first summer camp. She said at that time she was afraid to be away from home, and getting there was an ordeal. But she fell in love with it and even called her parents to ask if she could stay another week. They said yes.
“I spent the entire summer at camp,” she said.
Shaw returned year after year, and started working at camp when she was 14. Things changed when she was a senior in high school. Shaw was in a car accident and suffered a traumatic head injury. She almost died, she said. Despite her injuries, she recovered, went back to school and received her degree in recreation from Emporia State University and was hired at Camp Alexander in 1997. She also has her master’s degree from ESU.
In her tenure at Camp Alexander, Shaw has worked hard. She has a passion for team-building skills and found funding for a ropes course, which is a team-building exercise that benefits both youth and adults.
She didn’t stop there.
Camp Alexander didn’t have any equipment — not even so much as a soccer ball — when Shaw first started. Today it has the ropes course, lots of equipment and even canoes.
“I wrote a grant to get all kinds of equipment,” she said.
Shaw also created the Camp Alexander Summer Camp and the Adventure Education Program, a 16-week program that is taken into schools. The program is designed to teach students and teachers to work together as a team and that it’s not wrong to ask for help. At the end of the program, the class gets to go to Camp Alexander and participate in activities there. The students can fish, hike, use the mud slide or participate in other activities.
“It’s up to the teachers,” Shaw said.
The Adventure Education Program is funded almost completely by grants, Shaw said.
Shaw also worked on the Haunted Trail.
“This year it was crazy busy,” she said.
Camp Alexander is open not only during the summer. Whenever school is out, the camp has a day camp. Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, will be Shaw’s last day, both at camp and in her current job before she heads to Council Grove to take over the camp there. She and her family will live on the camp. She has been given permission to be a consultant for Camp Alexander for as long as they need her, she said.
“I’m still only a phone call away,” she said. “This is probably one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make. I’m not saying that I’m done here, but I need to take this opportunity for my family.”
Robert Cuadra, vice-chair of the board for Camp Alexander, said Shaw works tirelessly for the camp.
“She encourages the board to look farther ahead to do what they need to do to grow,” Cuadra said. “... That tells us she has a true love for camp and youth.
“When the youth of the area changes, she changes with them.”