A Children’s Museum’s Partnership With Local School District Brings in Revenue — and New Ideas

A lot of nonprofits had to be creative to make it through the challenges of the pandemic. For the Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac, that meant hosting a charter school for the 2020-21 academic year.

But what started out as a way for the museum to earn much needed revenue and for local students to return to in-person learning ended up being much more. Getting the chance to watch the school’s teachers interact with students every day and learn about the school’s approach to teaching has changed the way the museum thinks about education, says Andrea Welsch, its executive director.

“They definitely have helped us stretch our thinking on how we offer educational opportunities,” she says.

Financial Fears

The Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac depends heavily on ticket revenue and membership income. In 2019, that made up 38 percent of its $600,000 annual budget. When it became clear that the Covid crisis was going to last more than a few weeks, Welsch began to worry whether the museum would survive. Early in the pandemic, the Association of Children’s Museums estimated that as many as 30 percent of children’s museums might have to close permanently.

“There were days when I thought we were smack dab in the middle of it and that we were going down,” she says.

The association held weekly videoconferences to share information with member children’s museums, arranging calls for specific job functions — one for financial and human-resources officials, another for facilities managers, etc. Welsch participated in the calls for CEOs faithfully. When an association official said federal relief money would be going to the schools, she called the heads of two local school districts. The first was at lunch. But she reached Aaron Sadoff, superintendent of the School District of North Fond du Lac, and asked him if the district had any space needs for the coming school year.

“First I said no,” he says. “And then I’m like, ‘Well, yes.’”

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Treffert Way for the Exceptional Mind is a public charter school that seeks to teach to children’s individual strengths and emphasizes experiential learning, incorporating movement and other activities. Before the pandemic, it was housed with a traditional elementary school. More space would make it easier for students to social distance and allow the school to continue its active approach to learning.

At first, the children’s museum only offered its space for the first semester. When discussions between the museum and the school district started last spring, Welsch and other children’s museums in Wisconsin were envisioning December or January reopenings. But making the move didn’t make sense for the charter school if the space would only be available for half of the school year.

“So we really had to just commit on both ends to making this be the entire school year,” Welsch says.

The school used two existing classrooms at the museum and rearranged three museum exhibitions to create a third space. Students were virtual the first few weeks of the school year. Then until March, they were divided into two groups, each of which came to the museum for two days of in-person learning per week. For the last months of the school year, students were full-time at the museum.

The money that the school district paid for the use of the space covered most of the museum’s facilities costs, including its mortgage and utilities. Welsch says the arrangement limited the number of staff members it had to layoff and allowed it to provide programs, such as educational fun kits, to support families during the pandemic.

That puts the Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac in much better shape than many of its peers.

“The pandemic has been catastrophic for the field,” says Laura Huerta Migus, executive director of the Association of Children’s Museums.

Darren Hauck/Darren Hauck

She says the permanent closures the association feared largely didn’t happen, in part because of emergency relief like the Paycheck Protection Program but often because of painful cost cutting, mostly in the form of layoffs.

Huerta Migus and her staff were thrilled when they heard the news about the Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac’s partnership with the school district.

“We did a round of virtual high fives,” she says. “The partnership that happened in Fond du Lac was one of the first big wins for our community.”

New Ideas

The teaching philosophy that guides Treffert Way for the Exceptional Mind is designed with all students in mind, but it has been particularly beneficial for children with autism and other cognitive differences. That interested Welsch because just before the pandemic started, the Children’s Museum of Fond du Lac started planning a campaign to raise money to improve its facilities, exhibits, and programs.

One goal was to build a quiet, soothing room where children — especially those with autism — could go when the excitement of the museum led to sensory overload.

Now that the museum has weathered the worst of the crisis, it is again planning to expand. Through the partnership with the charter school, Welsch and her colleagues got to see a quiet room in action.

“They created one of those spaces in the museum,” she says. “It’s been really neat to see how they set that up so that that can help shape how we will set our quiet space up so that we can serve all children.”

The charter school also set up sensory swings at the museum. The swings have multiple purposes, says Tiffany Dolan, who taught second to fifth graders this year and became Treffert’s principal this month. Kids use the swings to soothe themselves, to take a movement break — or even as a place for imaginative play.

“My students would use that area if they were stressed or frustrated or overwhelmed with work,” Dolan says. “Swinging while working just offers them a little bit of a distraction that they don’t think as much about the work.”

The swings are another idea Welsch plans to incorporate into the future plan for the museum.

“Our partnership has literally shaped the way some of those improvements will work,” she says. “It’s going to make us that much stronger of a resource and that much more effective of a tool for parents and our community.”