UCF to lease Seminole County Student Museum

UCF reached an agreement Tuesday night, Jan. 24, with the board of Seminole County Public Schools to lease the district's Student Museum until June 2014.

The school board could no longer afford to fund the museum due to budget cuts. The county will save $75,507 per year by leasing the museum to UCF.

According to the school board's agenda, UCF plans to use the museum for several programs, including "camps, third-party rentals, charter and private school programs, fundraisers and other UCF activities." UCF will continue to operate the museum's current programs, including the popular fourth-grade field trip program, which contributes more than 3,000 visitors to the museum each year.

"This is a win-win situation," said Rosalind Beiler, director of public history at UCF. "This will allow them to continue to provide the educational opportunities for [the school board's] students to learn Florida history, and it allows us to provide opportunities for our students to learn to teach in that kind of a museum setting."

The school board will continue to own the museum, and UCF will provide the programming and staff. UCF will use the revenue produced through the museum to pay the staff. The funding to acquire the museum came through the partnership of Tony Waldrop, provost and executive vice president of UCF; José Fernández, dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at UCF; and the history department.

UCF will be responsible for the payment of utilities, custodial services, upgrades of interior maintenance and repairs, the cost of the administrative staff and the alarm system. The school board will remain responsible for exterior maintenance and repairs.

An agreement has yet to be reached by the board as to how the costs of the museum will be divided up among the seven cities in Seminole County. The total cost as it stands is $32,000, but the board is considering lowering the cost of admittance for students from $7.50 to $5, which would increase the burden on the county to $56,000.

Deputy Superintendent Anna-Marie Cote will have to forward a motion to the school board to retain the $5 fee.

"A lot of [Seminole County] families will have a hard time meeting the $7.50 fee," Cote said.

The UCF history department plans to develop a center for public history at the museum.

"Public history is essentially teaching and interpreting history outside the classroom," Beiler said. "We have a track in our master's program to teach students how to do museum education, archival management, historic preservation, heritage tourism."

The department faculty's vision is to create a space to have instructional labs for their students learning public history, such as a digital and exhibit lab where students can learn how to create exhibits.

Junior math major Andrew Voskuil believes UCF should prioritize its spending better.

"It's a good idea overall," Voskuil said about UCF acquiring the lease. "Just because it was marketable doesn't mean it's just important as other stuff like sciences."

Beiler hopes the lease will expand the future of the public history program.

"Public history happens out in the community and so this is providing us with a space and an audience already built in, in the fourth graders who come through every day, for our students to learn how to do public history out in the community," Beiler said.

The museum is 110 years old. This deal makes it by far UCF's oldest building.