Letter from the CEO

Wow! Mid- August, already, and the start of the new school year is just around the corner. [Of course that also means it’s the countdown to the start of the college football season - Go Bears! But I digress...]

Chabot's popular school field trip program resumes the second week of September and our Education Team is hard at work preparing for another busy school year. During the course of the next ten months we'll see somewhere in the region of 50,000 students from schools throughout the Bay Area, arriving at Chabot for their field trip experience - a visit that can be customized to include hands-on classes in, life sciences, physical sciences, computer technology, or environmental education. A simulated space mission in the Challenger Learning Center® can also be part of the experience and all students get to see a Planetarium show and spend time exploring the award-winning exhibits and touring the telescopes.

On school group days, I often head downstairs to chat with the students and teachers as they arrive. The excitement amongst the students is almost palpable, (even the journey up into the hills is a brand new experience for some of them) - and they can't wait to get off the bus and into the Center where the decibel level quickly rises as they head off to their various classes, or to the Planetarium and the exhibits. Meanwhile, the teachers I talk to tell me that one of the main reasons for choosing Chabot for their field trip destination is the excellent quality of our classes... and I certainly won't argue with that.

Thinking about the thousands of students who will be visiting Chabot over the next few months it makes me very pleased to realize that some of them will one day choose to join Chabot's Galaxy Explorers (GE) program, to take their interest in science to a new level as they learn to help others understand and become inspired by science. As I mentioned in my last letter, I recently had the great pleasure of accompanying a group of our GEs to Hong Kong for the conclusion of the Digital Skies Student Partnership cultural exchange project, sponsored by Museums Connect and the State Department. This has been a hugely successful partnership and I feel extremely fortunate to have been in the company of such professional, personable, and engaged young people who were exemplary representatives not only of Chabot, but of the youth of our community and of the United States.

By the way, another huge success story this summer, which I mentioned in my last letter, was our Space & Science Camp run in partnership with Galileo Learning. Attendance ended up at just under 750, which far exceeded our goals, and the feedback from parents and kids was a unanimous thumbs up. Congratulations to our Galileo Learning colleagues for another great summer camp season.

One simple way to make sure you receive early notice for next year's summer camp registration is to sign up for our E-Voyager Newsletter, which will also help keep you ahead of the crowd for information on special events and programs throughout the year.

So... we hope you'll feel inspired to visit Chabot this Fall. We look forward to seeing you... in fact I'm counting down the days... oh no, sorry... that's for that other thing!

All the best,

Alexander Zwissler
Executive Director/CEO

P.S. If you'd like to check out my occasional blog that explores how and why we decide what to believe, and the implications for science education and learning, you'll find my latest posting here:
 http://sciencewellsortof.blogspot.com/2013/08/science-well-sort-ofthe-final.html