COVID pandemic bites Exploration Place; visits down 72%, $1.5 million shortfall looms
Exploration Place is facing a 72 percent decline in attendance and a $1.5 million revenue shortfall due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its president reported Wednesday.
During the COVID closure — 106 days from March to July — the Wichita’s children’s museum and science education center missed out on an expected 100,000 visitors, said Adam Smith.
And since it’s reopened, July visits were 20% of the 2019 level and August was 28%.
Current projections are that it will be June of next year before it gets back to 75 percent of 2019 attendance, Smith said in a report to the Sedgwick County Commission.
The museum is currently limiting occupancy to 25 percent of capacity, Smith said.
The centerpiece of the facility, its 165-seat digital dome theater and planetarium, is currently limited to 41 people per show, Smith said.
“The truth is it’s been so slow we haven’t come even near breaching those capacity limits,” Smith said.
The $1.5 million shortfall is a combinations of losses suffered during the summer shutdown and projections for lost revenue in the current fiscal year, Smith said.
Exploration Place has applied for about $3 million in grants, some to make up for the revenue shortfall, but the majority to enhance the museum’s role in distance learning, Smith said.
The museum is a joint venture of the city of Wichita, which owns the land; the county, which owns the building; and a private nonprofit corporation, Exploration Place Inc. that operates the attraction.
Silver linings in coronavirus shutdown
Smith said the shutdown did offer Exploration Place an opportunity to reconfigure its lobby, a priority he’s had since he arrived in November and one that would have been difficult while the museum was operating.
The new layout is more efficient and allows for better social distancing to reduce coronavirus spread, he said.
“We’ve got like a mini-TSA process as you come into the building,” Smith said. “We ask everyone to sanitize their hands. We take everyone’s temperature.
“I know that there’s differing opinions in the community, but from our perspective we’ve had a lot of people complimenting us on that,” Smith said. “I think it’s what people generally want to see us doing.”
Also, Exploration Place’s online education efforts had made a decade’s worth of progress in the past few months, Smith said.
Blocked by health regulations from hosting summer camps experiences, Exploration Place did “Camp in a Box,” where children were provided with science kits and did their experiments at home with guidance from an online activity leader.
Exploration Place is also working with the Wichita school district to develop 44 video science lessons, which are expected to reach 17,000 elementary school students.
The museum is also working with the district on “virtual field trips” for students.
On average, Exploration Place hosts 305 school field trips a year, Smith said. “It’s likely this year the number will be zero,” he said.
This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 12:04 PM.
