By Julia Stumbaugh
As any parent knows, kids share more than just toys when they play—so it’s no surprise that a pandemic spells disaster for children’s museums.
A century after the 1918 Spanish flu caused health boards to shutter kids’ museums across the United States, the 2020 coronavirus again made touch-heavy exhibits impossible. Satellite branches of the Children’s Museum of Richmond in Fredericksburg and at Short Pump have permanently closed. The Virginia Discovery Museum on the Downtown Mall, however, stayed alive, and helped keep children who were forced apart by COVID together, with everything from mail-delivery craft kits to interactive Zoom storytimes.
It’s been a rough stretch for little ones and their parents. “That is the age group and demographic that has had very limited interaction with the world in the past year and a half, just because people obviously want to keep their babies as safe as possible… many of these babies have never seen another baby before, because everybody’s been at home,” says Janine Dozier, Executive Director of the Discovery Museum.
The museum fully reopened this Labor Day, but sales are only a third of their usual numbers. Half of the organization’s regular revenue comes from ticket purchases and yearly memberships. To recoup missing sales, the Discovery Museum will celebrate its upcoming 40th birthday with fundraising campaigns, including a drive to refurbish the carousel that has been spinning outside its doors since 2006.
Because the museum has been open for reservations-only visits since May, it spent months as the only available place for kids attending school remotely to socialize. In fact, the Baby Buds program—where the VDM opened early to welcome parents with kids 2 years old or younger—was the first time many wee ones ever saw children outside their family.
Hand sanitizer dispensers, mask-wearing mandates, and regularly-cleaned exhibits made these gatherings possible. “The museum’s policies during COVID have been very, very strict,” says Jacquie Pickering, who has volunteered at the museum for 37 years. “We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from families that they feel safe there…but from what visitors say, the kids seem to be enjoying everything just as much as they did before.”
Even children who were born pre-COVID have grown up in the world of the pandemic, and Dozier reports that they act differently upon their return to the museum. Unprompted, they clean their hands before interacting with an exhibit. They consciously space themselves out during crowded activities. And, after a year and a half of limited interaction with others, they must re-learn how to share.
“Children, much like adults, are learning how to navigate the world after being out of the world for a long time…but they’re figuring it out, and they’re resilient,” says Dozier.
Kids whose siblings are undergoing treatment at UVA’s nearby medical center can interact with a friendly kid-sized version of the children’s hospital; young members of locally placed refugee families can make connections at the train-track table, which is so large that it requires more than one child to get the train to chug all the way around.
“If kids share a common interest with another child, they’re inclined to get to know them,” says Dozier. “They’re not concerned with another child’s background, or where they’re from, or what’s their life experience. They just live in the moment and think, ‘Well I like trains, you like trains, let’s get this track to go all the way around.’”
Although it sometimes takes gentle encouragement from some of the museum’s 300-plus volunteers, who range in age from 13 to 83, even the shyest children leave the museum with new friends.
Hands-on activities like the track-building station and car-racing ramp are invaluable learning opportunities, says Isaiah Woo, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at UVA and a Madison House volunteer. He once watched a 9-year-old discover core engineering principles at the Discovery Museum by spanning the gap between two block towers.
“He figured out that ‘If I place the next one half off and then I weigh the back one down, then it won’t tip over’, because there’s torque,” says Woo. “I didn’t tell him to do that, I watched him figure it out on his own. I think that’s a lot of what the museum tries to get at, is not telling kids, not lecturing to them, but encouraging them to find creative, innovative solutions on their own.”
Over four decades, the VDM has established itself as one of Charlottesville’s longest-running nonprofits. In the six years before the pandemic, attendance soared, and partnerships with community organizations allowed the museum to welcome 25 percent of these visitors free of charge.
“We want to focus on what the next 40 years will bring, and what a new, renovated, beautiful carousel will bring,” says Dozier. “We can’t get the past 18 to 20 months back, but we can be optimistic, and we can be united, and we can be very much focused on supporting our community and setting our children up for success and joy and excitement moving forward, because they deserve it.”
