ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
*****************************************************************************

Time and money, as always - based not on any formal survey, but on my
frequent discussions with teachers and with administrators.

Time has to do with testing these days - several districts in our area
do not allow any time out of classroom before mid-March testing dates.
This amplifies our April-June school visit crunch and means some
districts can't come because we are booked up.

Most of the districts not coming are urban and in addition to being more
tightly focused on testing, they do not have the fund-raising capacity.
The vast majority of kids doing fund raising are selling to their
immediate family and so the success of fund-raising is directly
proportional to the median income of the families in the school.
Well-off suburban schools have PTA budgets that permit field trips,
inner city schools do not.  To get inner city schools to come, we
include field trip attendance in grant-funded professional development
programs, we write grants directly for field trips, we invite kids to
special events for free (one school brought a group to help us unveil a
new Hubble image, for example - their freebie was a PR move for us).

Dave

David L. Smith, Ph.D.
Director of Professional Development
Da Vinci Science Center, Allentown, PA 
http://www.davinci-center.org

Engage, Explore, Share

***********************************************************************
More information about the Informal Science Education Network and the
Association of Science-Technology Centers may be found at http://www.astc.org.
To remove your e-mail address from the ISEN-ASTC-L list, send the
message  SIGNOFF ISEN-ASTC-L in the BODY of a message to
[log in to unmask]