And then, you know, we branched out into taking students both undergraduate, they simply want to know about to management and husbandry and you know, and a whole spectrum of zoo activities. Most of it focused on the sciences though. Read More
And you provide housing?… Read More
We provide housing and we provide a stipend so that they can eat. Interestingly, the overseas agent, Asian students, particularly. A lot of students, we’ve had a lot of students from Vietnam, from Thailand, from China, quite a number of Russian students. I think we’ve had students from 40, 41… Read More
We give them a stipend, but it’s a fairly small stipend so that they can eat and they get a discount at the zoo and they do their own cooking and we’ve got washers and dryers and then the whole bit. So they get a stipend, but it’s a very… Read More
And we’ve been doing that now for about 18, 19 years. But then three years ago, we went to just about, three years ago, we expanded that. We had another school district come at us and they wanted to do a full-time curriculum. We’ve had on the drawing boards. Actually,… Read More
They do their full junior and senior curriculum at the zoo five days a week for a full day. And they’re doing all of the curriculum at the zoo. And we’re exposing those students to, not just the normal curriculum, but because we expose them to a lot of hands-on… Read More
And so now we, you know, we’ve got, we’ve got 34,000 square feet of research space, but we’ve also got an upper floor, two upper floors, because the two buildings are mirror that are connected, that are dormitories for 20 students. And then we’ve got four student houses. So we… Read More
Some of them are two weeks or a month. Some of them stay with us six months or a year, or we’ve had students that stayed with us for as much as two years, about half of them are undergraduate. About half of them are graduate students. About half of… Read More
And so we came back and talked to one of my board members who was Henry Doorly’s granddaughter and said, how do you, you know, how do you go about rounding up a bunch of ladies?… Read More
Cause in those days, docents were all women, you know, to, to come in and be volunteers, you know, cause we didn’t have very much staff. And she said, well, it’s real easy to talk to the junior league. They start things. They don’t run things or finish things, but… Read More
Turns out that she was a professor of English at UNO. So that’s kind of when we hatched the plan that I was going to quit that. She was, had all kinds of free time. And so I, you know, after the break I went back up and said, all… Read More
You had to do a test every week. You had to do take-home tests. You had to, you had to absolutely be there on time when you were scheduled to take a class around. And you know, and it is evolved from that. Now to the point that we’ve got… Read More
But, but that won’t, that won’t pay the, that won’t pay all the bills. And then of course, we’ve got a lot of other things that are going. So, you know, we’ve got the other 240 acres that are off display, breeding, holding and conservation. When you became director, you’d… Read More
What was your vision for the education element of the zoo and how did you start to develop it?… Read More
Well, I think fairly, fairly early on, I, you know, right after I became director, I went to zoo conference out in California and, and got introduced to a very odd species of critter called a docent. Up until then, I’d never even heard the word docent, you know, but… Read More
Part of it because we, you know, we’d had a push to, to display north American hoofstock because, you know, we were all, it was all foreign, you know, hoofstock and you know, the realities of life are, is that native north American hoofstock, particularly the cervids, don’t display well… Read More
So we did that kind of as a part of the justification for all the other things that we wanted to do out there. Read More
Has that been a successful endeavor?… Read More
Well, only from the standpoint that yes, it’s been successful, but only because of the fact that we endowed it. We endowed it right up front, because you’re not going to attract enough visitors in a drive-through park to pay for the maintenance. I mean, it’s just not going to… Read More
Well, now you’re gonna, you’ll have to go to the, we’ll have to go to see, we’ll have to go to the history which I brought with me. And in the, in the, in the, in the early 90s or in the 90s, you know. So you have a– There’re… Read More