Palm Beach + Art & Culture

Boynton Beach CRA

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Schoolhouse director ups traffic, seeks visibility for kids' museum BOYNTON BEACH — There's nothing like a new coat o...f paint - or in this case, a big new sign - for a building that, up to now, was plain white and mostly unremarkable. The Schoolhouse Museum & Learning Center recently won a national contest. The prize, scheduled to be unveiled this morning : Big, bright signs. Amy Hever hopes it's a big step toward increasing the center's visibility. Hever, 37, is a long way from New Jersey - and even farther from Japan. Descended from a Japanese-Irish interracial marriage - rare for the late 1800s - she spent some of her youth in Tokyo; she still tries to visit Japan every other year. She finished high school in New Jersey and followed her interests with a college degree in East Asian studies. She started in retail and transferred to South Florida, where she stumbled across Japanese culture in an unlikely place: suburban Delray Beach. "I was very surprised," she said. "I was unaware of the history" of the short-lived Yamato Colony and its legacy, the Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens. She went to work there, and was there on Sept. 11, 2001. One friend died in the towers and another on one of the planes. "It made me feel I needed to have a change," she said, "a better sense of purpose." She went to the local Red Cross, then to a hospital foundation. She returned to the Morikami in 2007 as director of advancement. She left again in July 2010, this time for the Schoolhouse. "It was really an opportunity to take on a leadership role," she said. A year later, she began the bold move of shifting the school from just a museum, adding "learning center" to its name. Aimed at kids up to age 9, it hosted about 25,000 visitors in the past year - an 8 percent jump over the previous 12 months. Hever says the museum is moderately priced and calls it a "safe learning environment." It's got 600 Facebook "friends" and 3,600 have signed up for its email "blasts." The building, in a former 1913 schoolhouse across from Town Hall, is owned by the city and run by a nonprofit. Each year, the city typically provides about $120,000, as well as about $80,000 worth of lighting, maintenance, janitorial and other services. The cash-strapped city's budget workshops are set for July, and Hever suspects she'll have to lobby hard for every dollar. She also continues to search for not just small donations but also big-ticket corporate and foundation sponsors - the museum recently got a $73,000 grant from the Quantum Foundation - "so we're not putting all our eggs in one basket." What do you like best about your job? "What's really neat is (that) the difference from last year to this year is nothing short of transformational." What are your goals? "Get kids ready for school and inspire lifelong learning, and serve as a cultural anchor that can be an asset to our area. We think we're doing that now." How do you compete with all the other attractions in South Florida? "We know what we have is unique. We know what we have resonates." http://www.schoolhousemuseum.org/

May 25, 2012