DA Summer — and DA Students — are Ready for Another Magical Summer
By Dylan Howlett
7-minute read
The summer of 1982 heralded two notable premieres. There was the release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, toward the end of which the film’s young protagonist holds his best friend in a tight embrace. “You could be happy here,” Elliott says to E.T. “I could take care of you. I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you. We could grow up together.” And then there was the arrival of a North Carolina-based summer camp with an Elliott-like gift for belonging. It was the first year of Durham Academy Summer.
For the better part of four decades, DA Summer has offered exceptional summer camp experiences — which now feature a trio of age-appropriate programs — for families across the Triangle. “We want to be able to create this awesome experience for the kids, for the campers, for the staff,” says Nigel Cabral, who was named director of DA Summer in September after previously serving as interim director and assistant director. “We want campers to tell their parents, ‘I can’t wait to come back at 9 a.m. the next day.’”
They invariably do, thanks to the staples of DA Summer: caring adults overseeing captivating activities in safe environments throughout DA’s 84-acre campus and state-of-the-art facilities. With the start of DA Summer less than two weeks away, Cabral provided a sneak preview of the summer ahead — and why he thinks this year’s installment promises to be DA Summer’s finest since its 1982 debut.
This year, there’s more DA Summer every day.
Camp Evergreen — DA Summer’s core all-day camp for ages 4–13 — will extend the end of its day from 3:15 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. (After Care is available until 6 p.m.) “That’s not insignificant,” Cabral says. The additional commitment from staff will make more time for lasting memories among campers — and return a little more time to caregivers. And for the first time, Camp Evergreen will have weekly themes — including “Animal Week” and “DA at the Beach” — to heighten novelty for returning campers.
Fridays are more fun than ever with “Friday Performances.”
Bubble shows. Demonstrations and experiments with Mad Science of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill. And campers who play leading roles in several song and dance productions dubbed “Pop Star Performers.” DA Summer finishes every week with a flourish.
The most refreshing tradition in the Triangle might just be “Water Wednesdays.”
How popular is the midweek cooldown replete with waterslides from Durham-based Bouncin’ Baye Inflatables? It was the subject of a playful April Fools’ post this spring from the DA Summer Instagram account, which inspired a conspiratorial — and grateful — reply from Bouncin’ Baye: “Get ready for an epic summer!”
If you love DA’s life-changing faculty, you’ll love DA Summer.
“Our faculty,” Cabral says, “are invaluable.” So much so that this year, DA faculty will comprise about 40% of DA Summer staff — to which they’ll bring their characteristic instructional excellence for campers and irreplaceable guidance for younger counselors, some of whom include DA Upper Schoolers. “That goes a long way,” Cabral says of the example that DA educators set for counselors. “It just plays into this huge cycle where we’re all helping each other.”
DA Summer lives to serve.
A sprawling campus that is green and open? Check. A pair of security guards who work full time to ensure that campus, and its campers, remain safe? Yep. A set of unique offerings for campers that change weekly? Of course. It’s the DA Summer way. “We want to serve families,” Cabral says. “We’re a service-based organization.”
Sold on DA Summer? It’s not too late to sign up! Friday is the deadline to sign up for any of the Session I weeks (June 9–27), and July 1 is the deadline to sign up for weeks in Session II (July 7–Aug. 1).
Student Summer Spotlights
Durham Academy students — at DA Summer and elsewhere — don’t see summer as a time of pure idling. It is a time of action, of growth, of experiences moral, happy and productive. Just ask two Upper Schoolers and one recent alum who will soon embark on summertime adventures that will position them as budding first responders, social media researchers and STEM practitioners.
Cate Everett ’25
Cate Everett missed her DA Class of 2025 Senior Challenge. She could be forgiven: Everett was two time zones away in the midst of a three-week wilderness horsepacking expedition through the Wyoming backcountry. Her group of 20 riders — guided by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) — covered more than 100 miles on horseback. Everett’s instructors said they had never been part of a group that covered so much ground. But it wasn’t without hardship. One of the instructors broke her leg when the horse that she was on got kicked by another horse, sending her sliding headfirst down the side of a cliff. Everett’s group had to evacuate the instructor across 20 miles of unforgiving terrain. “It was an intense trip,” Everett says. She smiles. “It was very fun.”
Naturally, she’s returning to Wyoming this summer to take a Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician course through NOLS. By the end of the program, which is specifically tailored to wilderness and survival skills like search and rescue, Everett will earn her WEMT certification. The road to get there is long: Everett and a friend will drive to Kentucky and along Route 66, through the Ozarks and west across Kansas, cross the Continental Divide and pass through Colorado. Their destination in Wyoming is the town of Lander, with a population of less than 8,000 nestled in the Wind River Basin. “It’s the middle of nowhere,” Everett says. It puts the “Wilderness” in Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician.
She is undaunted, in part, from her past experience with adverse and remote conditions: horsepacking, backpacking, overnight canoeing, overnight rafting. She has even out-paddled a pack of 30 hungry sea lions off the coast of Alaska. But Everett’s confidence rests, too, in the medical foundation she developed in Advanced (ADV) Medicine & Malady with Dr. India Bayley, an Upper School psychology teacher and sexual health educator. The course offers weekly modules on major areas of pathology, including trauma and infection, and places an emphasis on accurate diagnoses and appropriate treatments. Everett says she won’t dwell too much during the training program on the fact that she’s 18 and surrounded by older participants. She’ll think back instead to her lectures with Dr. Bayley.
The goal, Everett says, is to use her certification to possibly land a job as a paramedic while she attends classes at George Washington University, where she will enroll this fall. “I just thought that would open up a lot of doors,” Everett says of the certification program. It reminds her of one of her favorite lines from Marina Keegan’s poem “Bygones”: We’re too smart to sell our time / … / And summers lost for / Three lines on a document.
“Find something,” Everett says of making summer plans, “that you think will actually develop who you want to be and who you are authentically. What have you always wanted to do? How can you make that happen?”
Lilly Jones ’26
A productive summer can start, Lilly Jones knows, in the middle of an Upper School class. That’s what happened in her ADV Thesis course, during which Jones completed and presented a research paper about the effects of “doom scrolling” and “joy scrolling” on high school students. (“Joy scrolling,” Jones found, had either a marginally positive or neutral effect on a student’s level of happiness.) She spoke with Kelly Teagarden, DA’s program director for applied civic engagement and public purpose, and Jazmin Garcia-Smith, her college counselor, to see if she could find a way to sustain her research over the summer.
That’s how Jones found StrongHER TogetHER. The organization seeks to empower young girls in 28 elementary and middle schools across the Triangle through mentoring, service learning and fun. It is, in equal parts, what Jones hopes to bring to StrongHER TogetHER’s weeklong summer camp, during which she will lead several workshop sessions for middle schoolers to raise awareness about the effects of social media.
In her “Social Media vs. Reality” session, for instance, Jones will lead a coding activity that helps campers determine whether an image was edited — and how it contributes to an unhealthy internalization of body image. “Digital Detox and Mindfulness” will help campers who want to curtail their screen time but feel powerless to do so through a “screen time” bingo activity, which will allow them to assess their social media usage at home and create a “personal digital balance plan.” “Recognizing Online Harm” will present different scenarios to campers — about public shaming, for instance — and ask them to consider how they’d handle each situation. Jones will also lead campers through a spirited game of digital safety JEOPARDY!
She has discussed her workshops with Dr. Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association and co-director of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Winston National Center on Technology Use, Brain and Psychological Development who visited this school year with Upper School students and faculty; Middle School students and faculty; and, as part of the Family Matters Speaker Series, with DA families. Jones will continue her research next year in ADV Community-Based Research, and her work with StrongHER TogetHER this summer will help broaden her focus beyond high schoolers. Her research in ADV Thesis helped her stumble upon the work of Kathryn Buchanan, a former psychology professor at the University of Essex who was the only researcher whom Jones found to have referenced “joy scrolling.” That’s gonna be my gap, Jones thought. That’s what I’m gonna do. I have to do this.
“I didn’t think that I was going to work on this over the summer or into next year,” Jones says. “It was just fate.”
Kwame Mensah-Boone ’26
The start to Kwame Mensah-Boone’s summer would make Carmen Sandiego blush.
May 24–June 1: Travel to and from Taiwan (26,000 miles roundtrip) as part of his 2025 Cavalier Capstone.
June 14–20: Travel to and from Des Moines (3,000 miles roundtrip) with the DA speech & debate team for the 2025 National Speech & Debate Tournament.
But the commute for his primary summer plans is — thanks to its remote nature — far more convenient. Mensah-Boone secured a place in MITES, a prestigious MIT program that provides introductory technology, engineering and science explorations for students from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds. The digital program — with a yearly cohort of about 200 participants who successfully navigate an acceptance rate of less than 5% — stretches from June through December. The summer schedule that Mensah-Boone follows isn’t entirely dissimilar from the daily rigors of a standard school day: classes from 3–8 p.m., Monday through Friday. There’s a core class in math or science that complements a more specialized project-based course, such as machine learning or geospatial data analysis.
In between those courses, Mensah-Boone will continue his work as part of the City of Durham’s steering committee for participatory budgeting — a democratic process that provides community members with the chance to decide how to spend part of a public budget. There’s also the nonprofit that he founded and runs: The Economic Literacy Initiative, which provides economic education programs and, this summer, will onboard about 30 digital interns.
“I’ve always been kind of ambitious,” Mensah-Boone says. “I don’t like sitting idly and chilling out most of the time. I’d rather be doing stuff.
“I think this summer is an amalgamation of all the stuff I’ve been doing throughout school. It’s exciting for me to actually be able to make an impact here at DA and in other places.”
Know any Durham Academy students, families or educators who have a mission-driven summer in store?
Tell us! Email communications@da.org with more info.