Help the Helpers

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Campaign Emergency STEM Education

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About this campaign

We need help helping the helpers! The Discovery Center has closed its doors as a science center and reopened as a licensed emergency childcare center for healthcare worker and first responders. We are open 7 days a week from 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM. Each child gets three meals and a snack every day. Our health and safety standards are above industry standards. We have 2 – 3 nurses on duty and provide health screenings for all staff and children entering the Center.
To date, we have:
• Provided 77,000 hours of care
• Served over 750 child enrollments
• Given out over 30,000 free meals and snacks

Just $200 cares for a child each week. You can sponsor a child’s day for only $30. Anything you can do will help.
MORE ABOUT THE PROGRAM
Each class is limited to 10 students, and those students are kept from interacting with other classes. To accomplish this, a logistics controller tracks classes and students through a process that resembles an air traffic control room. All classes and students are cleared before traveling and tracked on a digital board while in transit, upon arrival, and while at each designated location including recess rooms, indoor mini golf, the giant hamster wheel, and other resource areas. Each of these trips are done through the supervision of runners and utility workers to ensure that children never cross paths and that the team can clean handrails, doorknobs, and every surface along the pathway or in rooms before the next class is cleared for travel.
All of this is extremely labor intensive. It costs us almost $5,000 a day to run the program each day and would cost us around $10,000 a day to run at full capacity. We’ve already served over 150 kids and given over 2,000 free meals. We need at least $180,000 to run through the end of May at our current enrollment.