This time the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro. As the Greensboro News & Record reports:
The museum seeks the city money for its “Building a Better America through Core Democratic Values” initiative, which aims to boost civil rights knowledge among North Carolina school kids and boost the museum’s bottom line.
The plan involves a partnership with state education officials that could bring thousands of elementary, middle and high school students to the museum as part of the curriculum.
The city’s requested contribution of $500,000 a year for the next three years would help outlying school districts with such costs as hiring buses for field trips to Greensboro.
But:
Museum officials acknowledged recently that the center is operating about $400,000 a year in the red. They attribute that mainly to inflexible operating rules tied to federal tax credits, which raised millions of dollars to restore the building that reopened in its present form three years ago.
But paying visitors also came in lower numbers than projected — about 57,000 last year, significantly fewer than the 200,000 hoped for in the project’s planning stage.
Where have we heard this before?
