Ask most kids their favorite thing about school, and recess and field trips often top their list. Unfortunately, tight budgets are making it harder, if not impossible, for some schools to take field trips. And that's bad news for businesses that rely on field trips for part of their income, including museums.
The Children's Museum in Dover has taken proactive steps to keep its field trip business. It's new one-year pilot program covers the costs of field trips for Title 1 schools, which are those with the highest number of economically disadvantaged students. Outreach Director Paula Rais got the idea while running the museum's Museum to You program, a traveling version of the museum that went to underserved communities. What I was hearing over and over again from the school groups was this is the only field trip we are going on all year because we can walk here,' Rais says.
The museum raised about $40,000 for the program through numerous funding sources, including the Thompson Family Foundation, the Kiwanis of Manchester and Bank of America. However, Rais says some Manchester schools still can't afford to come because the school district requires that a nurse travel on each bus and the $200 to $250 fee for that is cost prohibitive. Rais is not certain how many schools will be covered by the grant, but says the museum is already looking to raise funds to extend the program as education is a central tenet of its mission.
At Squam Lakes Natural Science Center in Holderness, school trips have been down 10 percent each year for the last few years, although they had a nice bounce back [in the] spring, says Executive Director Iain MacLeod. He says the trend was disturbing not only because school groups make up about 30 percent of the center's business (about 20,000 kids a year), but more importantly because education is a major part of our mission.
The center surveyed schools and found that fuel costs, fears of Eastern Equine Encephalitis and the need for more preparation time for standardized tests were all factors. In response, the center secured a grant to analyze its curriculum to make sure it is aligned as much as possible with classroom work, and is moving away from Web marketing back to paper mailings, which seem to reach more teachers.
Other museums have yet to feel the pinch. In Concord, the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium is in the midst of an expansion that will triple its size. Executive Director Jean Gerulskis says the planetarium expects a significant increase in attendance with the expansion, adding it has done more outreach to private schools and home schoolers, a nontraditional market for them. Attendance at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester also held steady, but Marketing Director Karen Tebbenhoff says that might be due to excitement about the newly renovated museum, which opened in March.
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