The Last Decade

A birthday party in the planetarium lobby, 2013. Photo by Lara Jackson.

By the early 2000s, the Science Center had reached a peak enrollment of 40,000 children visiting each year (more than a third of all schoolchildren in Pinellas County), and exhibits had expanded to include computing, climate science, electronics, and engineering.

However, the once-state-of-the-art facility had aged. Donors, board president William Schweikert said, had been pushing for the center to embrace a technology-focused curriculum, in keeping with the rapid changes in the world.

At the same time, schools across the area added their own computer labs and science resources as field trips became increasingly complicated and financially impractical, and other, newer facilities opened that promised to showcase the wonders of the 21st century. These left the Science Center more and more a relic of the 20th.

Schweikert announced a six-month closure, to begin in September 2009, so that the board and the Science Center’s staff of 22 could restructure things and come up with a more practical operating plan.

New director Joe Cuenco convinced the board to keep the center open. He promised to establish more corporate sponsorships (Progress Energy already had a major sponsorship stake) and bring in more STEM classes for middle and high-school-age kids. He also proposed renaming it the Center for Youth Innovation.

According to board member (and eventual president) Mike Mikurak, the writing was already on the wall. The Science Center’s shelf life was almost at an end.

“The large supporters that helped create the Science Center were no longer there,” he said. “The cost for providing educational services for elementary and middle school students continued to go up while the school system was, in essence, trying to create their own. The Science Center was losing money.”

The buses continued to run, although the number of students was noticeably smaller. The public still came for planetarium and observatory events. People booked the lobby and planetarium for kids’ birthday parties. The animals and the touch tank remained popular.

Bay News 9 set up a “weather station” allowing visitors to experience simulated hurricane- and tornado-force winds; robotics became a popular class, and state tournaments were held at the center.

With assist from the defense company Raytheon (Schweikert was director of engineering) and St. Pete College, they created a cybersecurity certification program.

New partnerships began to take shape, and new classes were unveiled in areas like robotics and cybersecurity. The Science Center leaned more heavily on its role as an event space.

These initiatives caught the attention of Ed Peachey, director of the job placement organization CareerSource Pinellas. The facility merged with CareerSource Pinellas in the hope of a joint partnership and access to a revitalized donor base.

Under the name of its parent corporation, WorkNet Pinellas, CareerSource “merged with” the aging Science Center in 2012, reconfiguring a portion of the space for its own day-to-day operation.

“Obviously, we’re going in there to make this work and kind of bring the Science Center back to life,” Peachey told his executive committee. “It’s fallen on hard times. It just needs an infusion of something new. We can bring that to the table.”

The property, he told them, was valued at $2.5 million.

Yet as schools improved their science curricula, they was less need for Science Center bussing. And as newer, shinier, more sophisticated science-focused destinations appeared (Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry, the Great Explorations Museum in St. Pete), the Science Center continued to fade. And to lose money.

CareerSource put more than $1 million into the facility, but by 2018, CareerSource was unable to make payments on their debt. The Science Center and its seven acres were sold to the City of St. Petersburg.

Plans were announced to demolish the facility to expand the Northwest Water Reclamation Facility.

The Science Center was not to end, however.

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