Buffeted by a continuous drop in visitors, the Science Museum of Minnesota is restructuring, cutting 43 full-time employees — or 13% of its staff — while reducing its $38 million general operating budget by $7 million.

Notices went out to impacted staff members on Wednesday, followed by an all-staff virtual meeting Thursday morning. The cuts are wide-ranging, in some cases eliminating entire departments, such as the four-member access and equity department and another 10-person department devoted to program evaluation, while in other cases partially but significantly reducing floor staff and other positions in information technology, STEM education and accounting.

“We have some levels that are more affected than others, but the (layoffs) are throughout the museum,” said Alison Brown, the museum’s president and chief executive officer, in a phone interview Wednesday. Upper management is also impacted. A vice president of museum experience is retiring, she noted, and his position will not be filled.

The cuts were condemned Wednesday evening by AFSCME Council 5 Executive Director Bart Andersen, who released a written statement calling them “shortsighted” and noting they are the third round of layoffs at the museum since March 2023.

“We’re not alone in facing these challenges,” Brown said. “Museums nationwide are experiencing unprecedented change, and successful institutions are those who adapt thoughtfully and decisively. We’re competing in a different world now. People are looking for immersive experiences. And we have to compete against the couch. People like to stay home.”Restructuring

The restructuring will consolidate the museum’s operations from four management areas down to three, a realignment that museum officials called necessary given a 6% to 16% decline in museum attendance nationally since the outset of the pandemic in 2020 and a major increase in at-home entertainment.

The drop in attendance at the Science Museum, which was founded in 1907 and has been located on Kellogg Boulevard in downtown St. Paul since 1999, has been especially acute.

“We’re down about 30%,” Brown said. “Our attendance this year is down 13% from June 30, 2024.”

To make ends meet over the course of the past five years, the museum has withdrawn some $15 million from its endowment, reducing its total endowment to $35 million.

Traveling exhibit revenue ‘almost completely gone’

Brown said the museum also has drawn revenue in the past by curating traveling exhibits for other museums around the country, and that revenue source is “almost completely gone. We had $1.5 million to $2 million in revenue from that.”

A Texas museum “pulled out at the last minute” after expressing concern about a traveling exhibit on skin — the largest organ of the human body — as potentially being perceived as diversity and equity-related. The exhibit, which focused on animal skin as well as human skin, “is a very STEM-related learning experience that’s joyful for families,” Brown said.

“We’ve had to make some hard decisions, because we have to balance our budget,” she added. “None of these things are easy to do. It’s a challenging time in the museum field. It’s not just us. Half of museums have not recovered to where they were before the pandemic. Since the pandemic, more people stay home.”

Despite cutting some 18% of its budget and more than 10% of its staff, the museum will continue to maintain paid professional actors on staff as part of its “Science Live” programming, which hosts a “live” dinosaur experience and other shows. Brown said visitors can still expect quality exhibits and programs, despite the belt-tightening.

Disappointment

Jennings Mergenthal, a community engagement specialist with the museum who uses they/them pronouns, said they weren’t entirely surprised that they and other employees in the access and equity department were let go en masse, given that positions were cut in that department in both 2023 and 2024.

Still, the news came as a disappointment.

“I felt like there was an institutional disinvestment in us as community engagement over the past couple of years,” said Mergenthal, who lives in St. Paul. “I think our department has done great work in leveraging museum resources to do equity work.”

Among their projects, Mergenthal was involved in a “community curation” program that connected artists and other members of underrepresented groups with a financial stipend to develop presentations about how their culture intersects with museum artifacts.

A Lakotah metal worker showed off modern metal art and explained “how indigenous art is not just a fixture of the past, but is ongoing in the present,” Mergenthal said, and a Guatemalan Mayan textile weaver made a similar comparison between her work today and longstanding museum pieces. Some presentations were delivered in multiple languages, a first for the museum.

“That’s now been cut,” Mergenthal said. “The museum is choosing to part ways with a number of talented staff across all departments.”

Even more surprising, Mergenthal said, was the decision to entirely eliminate the museum’s evaluations department, which studied the visitor experience and other exhibit and program data, such as feedback from teachers who received the museum’s STEM kits, which are designed to be used as classroom teaching tools.

“Turnover in the museum is such that many people were not here for the previous layoffs,” Mergenthal said. “There’s a sense of shock and hurt and betrayal by decisionmakers that things have gotten this bad and we only found out now in a very drastic way.”

Union notified

Following a recent labor drive, about two-thirds of the museum’s employees in 2023 joined the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, which represents their collective bargaining rights.

In a written statement, museum officials said the layoffs were in keeping with the inaugural labor agreements, which were ratified this year.

“We notified them yesterday,” Brown said Wednesday.

Andersen, the AFSCME Council 5 director, blamed the lay-offs on “persistent financial mismanagement” and said in a written statement that workers “have offered ideas, raised alarms, and put forward practical solutions to strengthen the museum’s future and avoid precisely this kind of harrowing moment.”