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Hi,

I have a question about providing good customer service for brown bagging school groups and am hoping to hear that others have implemented some good ideas in this regard.  

Some background: We have large numbers of school groups visiting daily, with slower days being approx 800 students and busier days 2000+. The majority of them bring their lunches instead of purchasing food in our cafeteria.  Our Centre has three (connected) buildings on different levels and is laid out in such a way that the entrance and lockers are a fair distance from the exhibit halls and
program spaces. Over 80% of our groups do something besides just visit the exhibit halls, so an itinerary for a group on any given day could be that they have a workshop in one building, a film in another, and an exhibit hall visit in a third.

While we have one brown-bag lunch area near the school entrance/check-in, it seats only about 150 students. There are other areas in the Centre where groups congregate to eat and some outdoor areas (good only in two or three of the school months), all of which are a good distance from the entrance/lockers. This means that students/teachers have the option of either carrying their lunches with
them as they explore the exhibit halls and take workshops; or they leave their things in the lockers and return to the front of the building to each their lunches while they sit on the floor. This is not ideal for a number of reasons - the main ones being that the floors get quite dirty after kids enter the building in the morning and that it's not OK to have an important visitor group feel their
only option is to sit on the floor.  While we've not had complaints about this from teachers, we're uncomfortable that we haven't been able to do more. 

Besides putting lockers throughout the building (which would not be great operationally or aesthetically) or building new spaces (not viable at this time financially) are there other thoughts on how we could best service this special visitor group at lunch? I've heard of carts that hold coats and knapsacks that are then rolled to another place when needed at lunch. Has anyone tried this? Is it
labour intensive? (using volunteers is not an option for us as we are in a unionized environment).  Other ideas? 

many thanks, 
Catherine


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Catherine Paisley
Director, Science Education
Ontario Science Centre
416-696-3295
www.ontariosciencecentre.ca


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