Report Card

When I was a kid, one of my least favorite days was when report cards would be sent home. I was a pretty good student, I'll concede, but I had one of those mothers who liked to nitpick. I once brought home a report card that had five As and one A-minus (I was a nerd). Her first question was, "Couldn't manage another A?"

I say this because we have a report card day coming up. The report from the Museum Management Consultants* is in our hands for final review before it's released into the wild. Because it is still in the review stages, I'm prohibited from speaking about its contents specifically. So we'll speak generally, and all will be clear when the report is made public.

The good news is that there is nothing in the report we didn't already know. We know we're short-staffed, we know we're inadequately funded, and we know that the personnel we have are not true museum professionals with curatorial, archival, or exhibition experience. We know that our building is too large and that our collection is too broad. We'll tell anyone that asks. Shucks, we might just put it on our blog.

The rest of the good news is that the MMC had the wisdom to compare us to museums with similar collections, not museums in a similar region as we had initially feared. Comparing us to the Science Museum of Western Virginia or the Mill Mountain Zoo would be the proverbial apples and oranges comparison, which is rarely more substantial than, "Well, they're both kind of round." Our comparison museums included the North Carolina Transportation Museum, the B&O Railroad Museum, the National Transport Museum in St. Louis, and a few others.

The bad news is that the results, while honest and forthcoming, are not favorable. No sugar-coating bushes or beating around dances here. They represent the good-faith recommendations of a business with more than twenty years of doing exactly this, and doing it with good results. What they presented is a well-rounded summation of what people in the biz call, "screwing stuff up."

When the report becomes public, one of two things will happen: One, the public will take little or no interest in it at all, as is the typical response to news involving the museum; or Two, there will be clamor for changes in leadership, organization, this, that, the other, etc.. Between the Scylla and Charybdis of apathy and antipathy is the best path for us.

All that said, we're not bringing home five As and an A-minus. Sorry, Mom.

*This report was the subject of our blog post that had to be taken down.