Spartanburg Science Center celebrates its 45th anniversary in 2023

It’s a lot in just three rooms.

Go to the end of the hallway on the second floor of the Montgomery Building in the Chapman Cultural Center and there it is: the John F. Green Spartanburg Science Center.

If you’re between the ages of 5 and 65, pay your $5 and walk through the doors into a jam-packed experience for anyone who loves any kind of science.

Look to the left and you’ll spot Teak the Tegu in his two-story lizard den, just outside the animal room, home to snakes and turtles, bearded dragons, and other creatures.

Look to the right and it’s the Fossil Room, with its artifacts and skeletons, a miniature natural history museum, complete with an elephant skull that stretches over 9 feet across.

Go straight ahead and try out the interactive displays on electrical energy, physics, and robotics.

It’s so much more than just three bedrooms.

Science Center instructors lead more than 500 educational programs serving more than 20,000 students in Spartanburg County and Cherokee County schools, most of them after-school Kids Clubs (formerly known as Clubs of Boys and Girls) in 18 schools.

At the downtown Spartanburg airport, high school students are learning about all aspects of aviation, hands-on and even in-flight.

And in a combination of classroom and virtual studio, podcasts and video lessons are recorded, followed by eager children ages 4-6 carrying out interactive activities and experiments.

When there’s an activity in every space, it’s a beautiful thing, says Science Center executive director Mary Levens. Beautiful, although sometimes a bit shrill.

“Learning is noisy,” says Levens, who joined the Science Center after a 43-year teaching career. “You have to be in touch with what the kids are doing, and they shouldn’t be afraid to ask a question.”

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Mr. Green’s Legacy and the Spartanburg Science Center

The Science Center is celebrating its 45th year in 2023.

Its origin can be traced directly to John F. Green, the science center’s founder and longtime CEO, from its founding in 1978 until his retirement in 2016.

For decades of Spartanburg students, the Science Center’s identity was almost indistinguishable from Green’s.

He would visit students at school, bringing snakes and lizards and other items from the Science Center collections. The students were delighted and learned and made lasting memories.

But when they got home, the conversation was often more about the experience than what the organization provided.

The same was true of many years of science-themed summer camps, which were often more associated with Green than the organization he created.

“Many parents say they didn’t know Spartanburg had a science center, but we’ve been here for over 40 years,” says Levens. “The kids knew because John went to the schools. But the parents did not. ‘Mister. Green came today’ doesn’t say ‘Spartanburg has a Science Center.’”

Levens and her small staff are working hard to increase the visibility of the Science Center as an organization.

Wofford students took classes among the animals with ‘snakes around their necks‘

Levens hires temporary instructors, usually teachers, for many of the center’s 22 half-day, week-long summer camps and to provide Kids Club educational programs.

The paid staff are two part-time retirees and one other employee, along with Wofford Bonner fellows specializing in physics, biology, and environmental sciences.

Scholars volunteer 10 hours a week as part of the Bonner program, but most work additional hours, for which they are paid.

Bonner scholar Mae Webster’s first volunteer posting as a freshman was in an office, where her duties included little more than filing, Levens said.

“He came up to me and said, ‘Would you take me if Bonner would let me change?’ I said ‘certainly!’ Bonner let her change and she’s been with me ever since. Now, she totally runs the animal room.”

Webster is in his senior year this year and will graduate from the Bonner program.

“I’m going to try to sign her,” Levens said.

Levens says having so many smart young people around keeps her on her toes. “They want to go and try things; they want to rearrange things. I’ll tell them, ‘Try it.’”

During the height of the pandemic, most of Wofford’s students were stuck in their dorms, attending remote classes on their computers.

Levens said the Bonner Scholars asked if they could come to the center and take their classes among the animals, socially distanced and spread throughout the otherwise closed center. It was beneficial for both the students and the animals.

“We had noticed that some of the animals were acting strangely. It was because they were used to being manipulated, they were used to noise, and it was deathly silent. So he had college students, one there, one there and they had snakes around their shoulders,” Levens said. “I’m sure some teachers got interesting views when they clicked and a student was in class with a snake around his neck.”

During the COVID pandemic, the Spartanburg Science Center expanded its footprint

Levens said that, like many organizations, a lack of revenue from visitors and canceled school programs during the pandemic made things “a little bit dangerous.”

And while the other organizations at the Chapman Cultural Center could close their doors and work from home, “we couldn’t close. We have 40 animals that need to be fed,” he said.

Rather than hunker down, hoping to survive, the Science Center expanded its presence and shifted its programming toward pandemic-friendly activities.

The center hosted socially distanced outdoor movies at Barnet Park and partnered with the Spartanburg Area Conservancy on a scavenger hunt for items found outside. Packages were picked up and dropped off, drive-through style, with gloved and masked volunteers tossing them into cars.

One particularly moving pandemic activity was the distribution of disposable camera bags, each with 27 frames of film inside, to children ages 3-12 to document Spartanburg during Covid.

Levens said her staff initially prepared 175 bags, but ended up distributing more than 320.

From the Herald-Journal archives:Spartanburg Children’s Pandemic Photo Exhibit

“It was a whole new experience for the kids: disposable cameras. The biggest comment (from the adults) was ‘I didn’t know they still do these things.’ The kids were ‘I took a picture, where is it? I want to look at it.’”

But they got used to it and more than 270 of the cameras were returned. The film was developed and digitized by Spartanburg Photo, with support from supporters including the Spartanburg County Foundation and USC-Upstate.

“We put together a team of professional photographers who went through and selected 33 that they thought were really good,” Levens said.

Selected photos were enlarged, staged, and displayed outside the center, turning a hallway into a makeshift gallery.

New spaces, new programs

The expansion of the center’s footprint into the Chapman Center included the absorption of an underutilized conference room next door. The renamed Milliken Learning Space offers additional space for meetings, classes, and camps. A company grant covers the additional rent.

At one end of the room, a one-eighth scale sculpture of a North Atlantic right whale is suspended from the ceiling. One shelf displays a model of a Saturn V rocket, made from Legos. It is a tribute to Milliken, which produces the color pigments used in Lego bricks,

A room at the opposite end of the building became the CONTEC Media Center last spring.

Levens pitched the idea to CONTEC Inc. CEO Jack McBride, who agreed to sign on. The AFL at Duncan, a frequent partner of the science center, provided some of the equipment for the room, which serves as a studio for podcasting and video recording, as well as being an additional space for programs such as the “Step into STEM” program for 4, 5 and 6 years old, which was developed by Webster as his senior project for the Bonner program.

“We feel like we now have a lot more room for disclosure,” Levens said.

‘Feel the learning’

Levens said spring and summer will bring a lot of activity, with the return of the First Lego League Jr. Robotics Expo and competition for teams of kids ages 6 to 10 on March 18.