The University of Georgia and Georgia Tech, bitter enemies in sports, are working together to design and build a special camp for disabled children in Jackson County near Athens.
Camp Hooray will make overnight camping more affordable for families with children who have special needs, and will be designed to let those campers play sports, swim, boat, have social activities and stay in cabins that are built to accommodate them.
Students at Georgia’s College of Environment and Design and at Tech’s College of Architecture will work together on the design. The 70-acre camp will become a living laboratory where their students and faculty will have the opportunity to create new and innovative structural and landscape designs.
“Our students gain practical experience through real-world projects,” said Dan Nadenicek, dean of Georgia’s design school.
The students will meet in mid January and hope to propose their ideas by the end of February.
The camp’s owning organization, Extra Special People, has worked since 1986 to give special-needs kids camping experiences. They have typically used established camps for weeks at a time, but because time there is limited, campers who want to come are not able to attend.
Camp Hooray will allow the organization to serve more of the 2,000 children in the area with developmental disabilities through weeks of day, overnight, and weekend camps in the future.
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