From the outside, it’s perfectly ordinary: a 1960s school in a modest eastern Henrico neighborhood, with squat brick buildings and covered walkways.
But behind the classroom doors, nothing is ordinary.
Open one door and find burbling aquariums of rockfish, pufferfish and spadefish. A bevy of small stingrays presses ghost-like faces against the glass.
Behind a second door, a curlyhair tarantula and an alarmingly large black widow lurk in their tanks.
Door number three leads to the Challenger Center, a dated but functional replica of a NASA control room and space shuttle, complete with revolving airlock.
The MathScience Innovation Center is a pretty wild place.
(Photo courtesy: MathScience Innovation Center)
So why, after 50 years of existence, is it still a secret? Until recently, not even the residents of the surrounding neighborhood knew it existed, says center director Dr. Hollee Freeman.
MathScience Innovation Center's director, Dr. Hollee Freeman. (Photo courtesy: MathScience Innovation Center)
In 1966, six local school divisions pooled their money to start a math and science center that could be used by all their students. Fifty years later, the center is the only such entity in the United States that has been continually funded by collaborating school divisions. Around 130,000 local students come through each year for intensive science education, from schools as far away as Charles City and Goochland. Teachers, too, come here for professional development courses. In the summer, children and teens sign up for camps on topics like crime-scene chemistry, forensic disease identification, computer animation and architectural design.
“I think it’s one of the few, if not only, places where kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds, neighborhoods, come together to work,” Freeman says. She recalls the time two boys from opposite ends of the city — one Latino, one white — discovered their mutual love of model rocketry. “Every Saturday, I would just watch these two kids get at it with the rockets,” she says, as they sprawled on the floor doing calculations together. That connection, Freeman says, is what the center is all about.
Now the center stands at a crossroads. At a time when technology advances at a mind-bending rate, the MathScience Innovation Center is struggling to find the cash to keep up. Its $4.4 million annual budget is funded almost entirely by the school consortium, but that doesn’t quite cover operating expenses, let alone innovations. “We still are a line item in every school division’s master budget, so they can just wipe us out at any time,” Freeman says. “Which they haven’t for 50 years, but it’s a possibility.”
The center does have a foundation that raises a small amount of money each year. “Not enough,” says Leo O. "Buddy" Whitlow, Jr., who chairs the foundation board. Less than 1 percent of the center’s budget comes from private donations.
Freeman often stays up until midnight writing grants for new programs. She dearly wants to look to the future and plan multi-year programs, but most days she’s just trying to keep up with the crisis of the week.
The chemistry lab needs entirely new equipment. Computers need upgrades. Four air conditioners broke last week, leaving students sweating.
“So it’s hard to run the place,” Freeman says, “like, figure out why the sinkhole is there, and how to fix that—“
Wait. A real sinkhole?
“Real. Yeah,” she says with a chuckle. “We fixed it. It’s fixed.”
The center’s can-do spirit helps make up for a limited cash flow. The maintenance crew uses the center’s 3D printer to make parts needed to fix aging systems. Last year, when the center ran out of space, instructor Wayne Gilchrest assigned students to build a canopied outdoor classroom. “We turned it into a STEM activity,” he says, as students learned to do surveying and construct beams and benches.
The center’s facing some competition as school divisions launch their own STEM centers, such as the Deep Run High School Center for Information Technology and the Math & Science High School at Clover Hill. Yet the MathScience Innovation Center’s mission remains vital, Freeman says. It brings students and teachers together and awakes their love of science.
“I was that kid,” Freeman says. She took courses at the center when she was in high school; she particularly remembers studying fingerprint patterns and conducting a 24-hour study of biorhythms, which meant staying up all night and roaming the city. Freeman went on to study science at Columbia University before becoming a math teacher. She taught at the elementary and college levels, got her doctorate in educational administration and coached teachers in New York City and Boston. In 2012 she became director of the center. She has been an energetic leader, Whitlow says, and “a visionary.”
Freeman working with students. (Photo courtesy: MathScience Innovation Center)
What’s her vision? To focus the center outward, Freeman says, and bring its programs to all of the region’s children. “Kids come here and do these amazing classes, courses, institutes. So what? Why? What’s the payback down the road? How does this benefit the region?” According to the Alliance for Science & Technology Research in America (ASTRA), Virginia will have 60,000 new STEM-related jobs by 2024, and the center aims to prepare children for those roles.
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(Photo courtesy: MathScience Innovation Center)
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(Photo courtesy: MathScience Innovation Center)
On the days when broken air conditioners and strained budgets get to be too much, Freeman slips into a classroom. She listens to teachers and kids talk about building Buckyballs, or programming robots, or farming oysters. “That,” she says, “brings me back to why this is important.”
