Kindergarteners and first-graders from Diller-Odell Elementary look at shark fossils that were found in Nebraska during their visit to the Nebraska State Museum. Photo: Anna Ripa, NewsNetNebraska
By Anna Ripa, NewsNetNebraska
Since getting its budget slashed in half seven years ago, the Nebraska State Museum at Morrill Hall has been in a financial holding pattern that is taking its toll.
Exhibits have become overcrowded with the museum’s 14 million artifacts because the museum is unable to expand. The popular hands-on Discovery Center is unstaffed and admission is now being charged. Yet, the museum is used by more than 7,500 elementary and high school students each year.
The state had big expectations for the museum when it was moved to Morrill Hall in 1870.
“The museum was going to be larger than it is today to model the other great museums in the world,” said Professor Priscilla Grew, director of the museum. “We only got about half of what was supposed to be built.”
Despite the financial outlook for the museum, Grew and others haven’t given up and are working to raise money to expand and display new exhibits on the fourth floor, which is now used for geosciences classrooms and offices. Museum officials also would like to add to the vertebrae paleontology collection and create a new climate gallery. Those are goals museum officials are trying to be realistic about.
“It would be a multimillion dollar project,” Grew said. “But it is difficult with the economy to raise money. We are trying our best working with the University Foundation to get support for the museum.”
Funding for the museum is a combination of state and federal grants and donations from private donors and agencies. For example, the Hubbard family foundation provided $1.2 million for the off-site Rhino Barn Ashfall Fossil Beds.
Proposals have been submitted for additional federal funding for Morrill Hall exhibits.
For example, proposals have been sent to the National Science Foundation to enhance the vertebrae collection and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the climate gallery.
If museum officials don’t receive the funds to renovate the fourth floor, they plan to enhance what they do have to eliminate the chances of the university losing the museum, Grew said. At one point during the discussion of the 2003 budget cut, ideas were exchanged about making the museum a state agency. Grew and others disagreed with that approach.
“It would be very difficult and much worse if it wasn’t part of the university,” she said.
“There are so many side benefits from the students and teachers helping with the museum. Plus, it would be harder going to the Legislature to compete for money.”
The help of the students and faculty is necessary after the museum cut paid staff. In order to keep staff on duty with fair pay, admission fees were instituted. In the early 2000s, admission went from being free to self-guided visits costing $4 for adults and $2 for children and gallery programs costing $6 for adults and $4 for children.
Budget cuts in 2003 left the museum with no money to expand its vertebrate paleontology collection. Museum officials sent proposals to the National Science Foundation seeking money to expand the exhibit. Photo: Anna Ripa, NewsNetNebraska
“Admission is very important because employees get money from admission. We no longer have money to put people on state salary,” Grew said.
The museum receives most of its admission from third and fifth-graders from 37 Lincoln Public Schools. In 2009, the museum was visited by 4,800 Lincoln students, in addition to children from the general public. The museum rented 4,000 kits, ranging in price from $10 to $25, to classrooms that can’t visit the museum. The kits include specimens of animals, rocks and fossils.
“We are self-sustaining, which means we earn our own money in programming and education,” said Kathy French, the museum education director. “We pay for our programs, educators and supplies through what we charge.”
Because educational programming doesn’t have its own paid staff, it relies on on-call educators in a variety of backgrounds, including museum content knowledge, biology and geology. The program has suffered without its own staff, which was cut in 2003.
Budget cuts also forced the elimination of staff at the Dr. Paul and Betty Discovery Center, which is available for kids to do hand-on activities like digging for animal fossils, smelling scents from nature and looking at animals.
“We don’t have anyone in the center anymore, and it’s very unfortunate because a person is a lot more engaged with students encouraging them to pull out activities more like a teacher would do in a classroom,” French said. “Now we just have labels telling them to pull out the drawers and do activities.”
In the future, French would like to have a volunteers work in the Discovery Center, but she sees a problem getting a volunteer program started.
“We would need another paid staff member to coordinate that whole program, and we just don’t have funds for it,” she said.
The Nebraska State Museum at Morrill Hall is seeking funding for a multi-million renovation project so it can showcase new artifacts. Photo: Anna Ripa, NewsNetNebraska
The museum relies on more than 100 volunteers from the geology department, mostly students, for its annual Dinosaur and Disaster Day. In February, Morrill Hall had a record 2,600 people who came to learn about dinosaurs, tsunamis and volcanoes.
Besides its programs, the museum has expanded to about 14 million objects and artifacts, compared with the 6,000 items it had when it started out in 1870. Most of these artifacts have been donated through research done through the museum.
“We are a research museum, so we have faculty and students who do research in various areas of the world and bring to back to museum for display,” Grew said.
As part of the Nebraska Highway Salvage program, road workers notify the museum when they encounter fossils during new road construction. The museum sends professionals out to excavate the fossils and bring them back to museum.
The museum can keep visitors busy all day. It has galleries about dinosaurs, wetlands, rocks and minerals, evolution, people of the buffalo, and Nebraska’s ecology. The newest exhibit, which will be released in the fall and replaced the Indian weapon exhibit, showcases Navaho weaving. The Mueller Planetarium seats more than 80 for public shows.
The off-site exhibits of Ashfall Fossil Beds and Trailside Museum of Natural History are also owned by the museum.
“We want to be a resource to the general public and the students at the university,” Grew said. “In order to do that, we need funds to enhance the learning experience, and we need to renovation to make this work.”
Tags: State museum
