By Mason Edwards, The Chattanooga Times Free Press
Hamilton County Schools will soon start distributing four free passes to the Creative Discovery Museum to county kindergarteners again this year, County Mayor Weston Wamp announced at Westview Elementary Tuesday.
The school hosted a celebration of the county’s partnership with the museum in which Wamp, Hamilton County Superintendent Justin Robertson and Creative Discovery Museum President and CEO Tim Sears handed out books and admission tickets to around thirty kindergarteners.
“I bet some of yall like to do art.. who likes to dance… who likes dinosaurs, robots?” Sears asked as all of the tiny hands flew up in the air. “We are so excited to welcome all of you this year.”
While Wamp highlighted the museum as a great family activity, Sears emphasized the museum’s activities that help empower learning in students.
"Our exhibits offer kindergarteners an opportunity to engage with concepts in a way that enhances their classroom lessons, making learning both fun and impactful,” Sears said. “For example, while students may read about fossils or use small sensory bins at school, here they can step into our full-size dinosaur dig pit and uncover fossils themselves.”
According to Wamp, the idea for the partnership came from one of his family trips to the museum last year. The passes will be phased into classrooms over the coming weeks and distributed through teachers. Throughout the program’s first year, kindergarten families redeemed roughly 4,000 trips to the museum, including repeat visitors.
In 2023, every family with a kindergartener received a pass allowing up to four people unlimited free admission to the Creative Discovery Museum in downtown Chattanooga, but the new passes are only good for a single trip, Wamp said.
“What we were doing last year was a pilot, it was an experiment,” Wamp said. “What we feel like is sustainable based on the size of the county’s gift is for this to provide basically four passes per kindergarten family.”
The passes feature a message from County Mayor Wamp, detail contact information for the museum, outline some rules and expire on May 31, 2025. In print, the passes explain that they’re good for the named kindergartener only, which caused an issue last year for University of Tennessee at Chattanooga student Mallori Crocker and her then five-year-old niece, Ava Crocker, who attends Brown Academy.
“We had to email her teachers, the academy principal and we also had to call the director for the museum,” Crocker said. “But by the time they had given us the pass, it was two weeks before the expiration date.”
Crocker explained that Ava’s pass was issued to her with out-of-date information that didn’t match her name change from three years prior. When Ava went to the museum, she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed in and cried.
“I think we've done a better job working with principals at every school, and it's a lot to ask kindergarten teachers,” Wamp said. “I know all the things that kindergarten teachers are responsible for and getting things home is not always very easy, but the school system's been an awesome partner in helping us organize it.”
Photo Gallery by Mason Edwards.
The Hamilton County Commission included the $50,000 needed to fund the program in this year’s budget. With four passes per family and 4,000 Hamilton County kindergarteners– according to a County Mayor media advisory– the admission of up to 16,000 attendees is already paid. With general admission to the Creative Discovery Museum costing about $20, the museum gave the county a discounted, bulk rate.
“I feel good making that contribution of tax dollars to this great facility that serves so many in our community,” Wamp said. “This ensures in the years to come that kids, again, regardless of their background during our public school system will have an opportunity to visit.”
According to Wamp’s spokesperson, Haley Burton, the passes will be distributed to charter schools, but homeschooled kindergarten students are not eligible.
Wamp added, “Here in our community, there's not a better way for a kindergartner to spend the day with mom or dad or grandparents or brother or sister than at the Creative Discovery Museum.”
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