School Groups, GDP, and Our Community Interdependence

“No one thought it strange that a boy and a girl, each carrying a book bag and an instrument case and who would normally be in school, were visiting a museum. After all, about a thousand school children visit the museum each day.”

– From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler

In my search to understand the state of museums today and how the field continues to emerge from the Pandemic, I found one area that I had yet to consider, let alone understand its recovery; that of school groups. Yes, the iconic museum field trip, with teachers and chaperones, yellow school buses, and docents touring children through galleries. Those visits are down, which may say more about the economy and employment than museums.

For museums, school group attendance should be a predictable roster of visiting schools, grades served, and curriculum connections made. Each institution with an established program, school, and teacher relationships.

Despite this seemingly stable program, museums are seeing a drop in their school group numbers. Why?

We’ll get to this, but first, join me on this tangent as l explore the Gross Domestic Product, more commonly known as the GDP, which is used to measure and report on a nation’s economy. If you know that measurement, you can measure an industry’s impact within that economy, such as museums. In 2016, the American Alliance of Museums 's, or AAM, did just that. They found that U.S. museums contribute $50 billion to the nation’s GDP as part of the $1.10 Trillion contributed by the arts and culture. AAM’s executive director at the time wrote, “The numbers tell an indisputable story about museums as true economic engines for their communities, supporting jobs and wages that are vital to the health of their hometowns.” This number also represents employment numbers, supporting 726,200 jobs, with 372,100 working directly at a museum. If you’ve ever wondered what a museum is, it’s an organization that’s “also essential to the national economy — generating GDP, stimulating jobs, and contributing taxes.”

In my 2023 interview with Craig Fugate, FEMA’s Obama-era Administrator, he shared something that struck me at the time as inherently important but not widely discussed within the broader museum and cultural community: that of the economy. When I asked him to define a museum’s role in a community, he said, “…importantly, it’s the recognition that museums are also part of the economic structure of their communities, so they are part of the economy. When people come to see the collections, that’s foot traffic, which also is part of how the museum contributes to the economy, so it’s both an economic issue and a cultural and educational one, as museums offer services to the general public.” If you read the AAM economic report, you’ll note that the language is similar. Fugate first speaks to the typical role of museums, that of education and collections, but his real answer is financial.

Now, back to the school group discussion. In the wake of the Pandemic, organizations found themselves exploring new ways of working, some out of necessity due to staffing cuts and depleted resources, and, for many organizations, those changes were less siloed, more innovative, and often audience-focused, as they had to be. The?Nelson-Atkins?Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, is one such museum. Who used this moment to rethink their staid drop-in docent-led tour offerings. Where visitors are greeted by the friendly waiting docent flanking the information desk. To a new, in the gallery effort, what they’re calling a “station-based” approach. Where docents now explore shared themes and topics with visitors and “station” themselves in galleries throughout the museum. This new approach has improved collaboration among educators and docents, increased visitor interaction numbers, and offered docents a greater variety of artworks that can be included; for example, smaller artworks that were previously challenging to discuss on tour are now fair game. While the museum has found an improvement here, it is also one of many museums seeing a drop in their school group tour numbers.

“The pandemic was absolutely devastating for field trips. They went off a cliff, even when schools went back to in-person,” shared Susie Wilkening , a museum research guru, in an April 2024 Education Weekly article. “Statistics bear this out. In the spring of 2023, Wilkening Consulting and the American Alliance of Museums surveyed 340 museum directors from around the country on post-pandemic visitation. Forty percent of respondents reported that they continued to experience lower on-site visitation from K-12 teachers and students.”

Marla Van Thournout , the?manager of?volunteer?engagement at the Nelson Atkins, attributes the decrease in school group tours as part of a more significant national issue. That speaks of:

• A shortage of school bus drivers.
• A shortage of substitute teachers.
• Prevailing school and teacher concerns stemming from the so-called pandemic brain drain and missed classroom time.

Van Thournout and her colleagues are right, “Logistic and funding may also be preventing schools from returning to on-site field trips. Educational?researchers?have suggested that some schools prioritize resources toward activities that may improve student achievement on standardized tests over experiences like field trips, whose results aren’t as quantifiable. That may be especially true for schools struggling to help students recover from pandemic-era learning declines.” For other schools still pursuing field trips, curriculums and testing now influence site locations, as reported in a December 2023 New York Times story, “Field Trips Today: Museums, but Also Wastewater Plants.”

It’s not just the many challenges confronting our teachers and the worries of school administrators. While science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, are having their heyday, the arts have become marginalized. “Full Steam Ahead for STEM” slogans aside, there is no room at the table for art, and STEM isn’t expanding anytime soon for STEAM. Today’s university students, consumed with future debt and employment prospects, married with university tactics of following monied-based pursuits, have left little or no room for the arts and other humanities degrees. When West Virginia University in 2023 “sent layoff notices to 76 people, including 32 tenured faculty members, as part of its decision to cut 28 academic programs — many in areas like languages, landscape architecture, and the arts.” As to why, E. Gordon Gee, WVU’s president, shared in a Washington Post article that “the cuts were necessary to free up resources for higher-demand programs” or in the interests of “students who are fleeing to majors more closely aligned to employment.” If Gee is correct, the arts and humanities don’t support the economy, let alone the almost 1 in 5 Americans who speak a language other than English in their homes.

It’s hard to argue with students’ concerns about their future employment prospects, student debt, and the direction taken by many universities if it wasn’t so maddening and misinformed. For all the talk of STEM and its economic importance, it’s a three-legged stool without the arts. “Nationally, the nonprofit arts and culture sector generated $151.7 billion of economic activity in 2022 — $73.3 billion in spending by arts and culture organizations and an additional $78.4 billion in event-related expenditures by their audiences. The industry supported over 2.6 million jobs, provided $101 billion in personal income to residents, and generated $29.1 billion in tax revenue to local, state, and federal governments,” as reported in an October 2023 Forbes article. Also, Mayor Hillary Schieve of Reno, Nevada, shared the perspective that “Arts activity creates thousands of direct and indirect jobs and generates billions in government and business revenues. The arts also make our cities destinations for tourists, help attract and retain businesses, and play an important role in the economic revitalization of cities and the vibrancy of our neighborhoods.”

Does this mean that today’s middle schooler, college student, or working parent will be a professional artist, work for a cultural organization, or paint murals? No, it doesn’t, but it does offer them something else, according to writer Daniel Pink. In his 2005 book, A Whole New Mind, argues, “The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers … We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.”

The arts matter and are economically vital, and it’s essential to realize that many of the issues that our schools, teachers, and students now deal with are not local but national, such as the plight of substitute teachers or bus drivers. Two examples. Both are a national headache-turned migraine. Like any industry, our institutions are equally impacted by staffing shortages, supply chains, inflation, and other issues. Museums contribute to the GDP and are subject to the same economic challenges as everyone else; our success can only be realized by active participation in our communities. When our schools are dealing with staffing issues, we then are also dealing with staffing issues, and the problem becomes ours to support.

Another Craig Fugate and FEMA term is “Whole Community,” which means that everyone, not just the government, is responsible for emergency preparedness and mitigation. A disaster is a disaster; some are economic, some are natural, and others stretch beyond classification, like the Pandemic. In the U.S., a shortage of substitute teachers and bus drivers is a disaster. Yet, it’s not an American story alone; Michele Stockley , the head of learning at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, shares that “across our network of other museum educators, we’re hearing that the return to pre-COVID visitation is very slow.?Due to the pressures placed by the increased cost of living, increased transport costs for schools, and cost of replacement teachers to cover teachers leading visits are making excursions costs prohibitive for many families/schools.” And it’s not just staffing and rising costs; there are also other, “challenges for teachers in organising visits including more paperwork and administration activities, risk assessment associated with organising excursions and teacher shortages.” Stockley also shared that if that wasn’t enough, they also don’t have enough buses.

To solve these issues, we need a whole community approach, solutions that marry willingness, and the financial resources to resolve them. In a provocative New York Times Op-Ed from February 2024, former Queens Museum of Art director Laura Raicovich?and?PowerHouse Arts board chair Laura Hanna write, “To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways,” in which they pose that cultural organizations need federal infrastructure funding to cover the approximate “40 percent — that involves infrastructure costs like keeping the lights on and paying the staff salaries.”

She’s right; what’s called for and needed is a national infrastructure for our schools, communities, and cultural resources, serving as a foundational underpinning, with framing provided by individuals, communities, and organizations like museums.

If history is correct, and our memories haven’t washed over our Pandemic experiences, then each of us, in our own way, had to reinvent ourselves. We did so personally and professionally, as did our organizations. We saw our museums become anew online and many in direct service to their communities, where parking lots became WIFI hubs, and car parades became vehicles for culture and connections. Our buildings served as food distribution centers, testing centers, and vaccine clinics.

Our Pandemic-based work is still needed, as is that reimagination we saw during those dark days and the need to serve. What’s called for now is a new commitment to one another, our audiences, and our communities, a contract that reads, “We’re all in it together.” A decline in school group visits is not permissible, as our children can’t be without a background in the humanities, and creativity is our new productivity. Or, as author Samuel W. Franklin writes in his book The Cult of Creativity, “In a world in which every last thing is being quantified, in which science, technology, engineering, and math get beefed up at every level of education while art and humanities programs are cut, any attempts to push back and restore such art education opportunities should be celebrated.”

Note: Originally published Friday, October 4, 2024, on the MuseumNext Blog - https://www.museumnext.com/article/school-groups-gdp-and-our-community-interdependence/