Sign-Up Forms for Children's Classes and Camps

Registration season

Late May is registration season. Summer camps fill up, fall classes open their lists, and parents fill in forms on their phones in the evenings.

A typical form asks for the child's name and birthdate, school, home address, a parent's phone and email, an emergency contact, a health card number, allergies, medications, and a box for anything else.

That is a great deal of information about a child, typed into a website by someone trusting the business to look after it.

Most of these forms were built once, copied from another camp's form, and never questioned. Some of what they ask is needed. Some is habit.

What the law asks, in general terms

Canadian privacy law for businesses rests on a few plain principles. PIPEDA, the federal law, covers commercial activity in most provinces.

Several provinces have also passed privacy laws of their own for businesses, and where and how a business deals with personal information decides which law applies.

Collect only what you need for a purpose you can name, and tell people what that purpose is. Protect what you hold, and keep it only as long as the purpose lasts.

Health details and information about children deserve more care than a mailing address. Read this as general information; a lawyer can say how the rules apply to your own classes.

Questions worth cutting

Go through the form one field at a time and ask what would go wrong without it.

• Full birthdate, when an age or school grade sorts the groups.
• Health card number, which a short class rarely needs.
• Home address, unless you mail something to it.
• School name, which nothing in a weekend class uses.
• Open health questions that invite a full medical history.
• How did you hear about us, made compulsory.

The fifth is the one that collects the most. A box labelled medical history gets a paragraph of diagnoses, when the instructor needed to know one thing: what to do if something happens.

Asking about health narrowly

Some health information is genuinely needed. A camp leader should know about allergies, medication the child carries, and anything needing a quick response, such as an inhaler or an auto-injector.

Ask exactly that, in words a parent can answer: does your child have an allergy or condition we should know about to keep them safe, and what should we do if it comes up.

A specific question gets a specific answer. An open box headed medical information gets everything, including details nobody running a class should hold.

Explain why, on the form itself

Parents give information more comfortably when they can see what it is for. One line under a field does the job.

Under the emergency contact: so we can reach someone if we cannot reach you. Under the allergy question: so the instructor knows before the first class, not after.

A short note at the end covers the rest: who sees the answers, where they are kept and when they are deleted. Plain sentences beat a link to a policy nobody opens.

Photographs and newsletters, asked separately

Two requests often hide in the terms: permission to photograph the children for the website, and permission to send the parent a newsletter.

Give each its own unticked box, and let registration go through either way. A parent who wants the class but not the photographs should not have to choose.

The newsletter also falls under Canada's anti-spam law, which expects consent to marketing email to be asked for clearly and on its own, and does not accept a box ticked in advance.

A worked example

A model train and hobby shop in a suburban strip mall runs Saturday model-building classes for children and a week-long day camp each July, with registration through a form on its website.

The form had been copied from a sports camp years earlier. It asked for a full birthdate, school, home address, a health card number and a large box headed medical history.

Every submission was emailed to the owner's personal address, where three summers of children's details sat in one inbox. The form plugin kept its own copy of each entry on the website as well.

Nobody had chosen any of this. It was simply what the old form did.

The new form asks for the child's name and age, a parent's name, phone and email, an emergency contact, and one question about allergies and conditions, each with a line saying why.

Photographs have their own unticked box. Submissions go to a shop address two people read, stored entries are cleared the week after camp, and the old emails are gone.

Where the answers end up

A form rarely keeps its answers in one place. Each submission is usually emailed to someone, often stored by the form plugin on the website too, and sometimes printed for the instructor.

Every copy counts: an inbox open on a shared computer, a clipboard on the counter, a forgotten list of entries on the website.

The form page should load over HTTPS, so answers travel encrypted. From October, Chrome will also show a not secure warning on plain HTTP pages the moment anyone types into a form field.

Deleting after the season

Information collected to run a camp in July has done its job by September. Keeping it longer serves nobody, and every extra month is another month it could leak.

Decide what you must keep and for how long: payment records for your accounts, and an incident report if something happened. Delete the health notes, emergency contacts and printouts.

Put the deletion date in the calendar now, not in a quiet week that never comes.

Returning families fill in a fresh form next year, which also catches the allergy that appeared over the winter.

The counter-case

Some programs genuinely need more. An overnight camp, a sport with real injury risk or a class for children with particular needs may require detailed health information.

A business in that position should get proper advice on what to collect and how long to keep it, rather than relying on a short list like this one.

For a craft class or a day camp, though, the principle holds: ask for less, say why, guard it, and delete it when the season ends.

Before registration closes

1. Read your form as a parent would.
2. Cut fields nobody uses to run the class.
3. Narrow the health question to safety needs.
4. Add a line explaining each sensitive field.
5. Separate photographs and newsletters into unticked boxes.
6. Find every copy of the submissions.
7. Set a deletion date for after the season.

Step six is the one that surprises owners. The form can be tidy while three years of answers sit in an inbox, on the website and in a drawer.

Another place where small print on a website carries legal weight is covered in Made in Canada claims on a product page.

Frequently asked questions

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