School field trips return to Naper Settlement as attendance inches toward pre-pandemic levels
Attendance at Naperville Settlement is showing signs of bounding back to pre-pandemic levels, officials there say.
The number of visitors in 2022 to the Naperville historical museum campus, located just south of downtown, was 105,811, up 14,007 from the 91,804 reported in 2021, according to a settlement report released this week.
Attendance figures include general visits, group and school tours, Naper Nights Concerts and events, large scale rentals (Woman’s Club Art Fair, SoulFest, Naperville AleFest), weddings and trade shows.
The settlement still has a ways to go to full reach pre-pandemic numbers from 2019, when 132,482 people visited Naper Settlement.
One of the biggest drivers of the 2022 attendance increase was in school field trips and programs, which rose 7,851 over the previous year to 12,332.
Jeanne Schultz Angel, associate vice president in the settlement’s learning experiences department, said the number of students taking onsite field trips declined because of restrictions put in place by the Illinois State Board of Education.
While private school students and home-schoolers continued to visit the settlement amid the pandemic, Schultz Angel said most public schools did not.
In reaction, Naper Settlement field trips went virtual.
Of the 4,481 visits from students in 2021, 2,424 were virtually via computer or tablet.
“Trying to predict our attendance for field trips has been especially challenging over the last few years not only for Naper Settlement, but for museums all over the state just because we weren’t sure when those restrictions were going to be lifted,” Schultz Angel said.
After a slow spring in 2022, Schultz Angel said school visits to Naper Settlement started to crawl back up in the fall.
“We’re excited about that,” she said. “And we’re seeing some encouraging results for the rest of the school year.”
Schultz Angel said settlement educators are talking to teachers and evaluating existing programs to ensure the museum is giving teachers exactly what they need.
The pandemic changed education, she said.
“The challenge is to make sure we are adapting our programs to what is needed in 2023 and 2024.” Schutz Angel said.
“It behooves us to make sure those lines of communication to the area districts and the regional schools are really, really open, and we’re listening to the teachers and administrators and what’s going to work for them now.”
For instance, she said a teacher can sign up for an in-person field trip, and the settlement can add a piece of distance learning when the teacher returns to the classroom to reiterate what students learned at Naper Settlement.
“It becomes this sort of hybrid model that we’re looking at,” she said. “We’re looking at the effectiveness of this now, but it looks very encouraging.”
