Dear Andy, Thank you for taking the time to share your experience with us. We’re so sorry to hear you were disappointed by your recent visit to the museum. To answer your question, the Museum's funds are spent on creating new experiences for our visitors through innovative programming, community outreach initiatives and bringing in compelling traveling exhibits. If you take a peek at our Instagram and Facebook accounts (links below), you can see our exhibit team hard at work throughout the spring refurbishing components for the Sandy Island and Bricks & Sticks exhibits, moving the traveling exhibit Healthyville out while Motion Mania moved in, caring for our live animals, preparing the reopening of Our Backyard, inventing water features for H2Oh! and developing a brand new section of Communication Station focused on a collection of 1,000,000 stamps. Our News12 Studio in Communication Station was overhauled in February and now includes brand new equipment including a monitor, teleprompter, updated news desk and a touch screen to choose which clip our young broadcasters will feature. This is just a small sample of what’s going on in our exhibit department every day. In the coming months, visitors will see new play areas added to TotSpot, our Early Childhood Studio refurbished, the animation station and weather wall in Communication Station updated and a fresh paint job for the exterior of the Museum. It might help to know that the $12 admission cost does not cover mostly salary... in fact, 78% of our expenses cover program services (exhibits, public programs, theater, community outreach); only 8% goes to fundraising and 14% for administrative purposes. We are quite lucky to have an active corps of volunteers that can assist our staff of nearly 100 professionals and help us keep our visitor experience high and administrative costs low. You might be surprised to learn that if we relied purely on admission costs, the museum would only be open 4 months each year! To cover the true cost of theater productions, the average theater ticket would cost $20... not $4. To cover the cost of materials, staff and cleaning for our early childhood programs, we would need to charge $10 per person... not $2. There would be no free pop-up crafts every weekday afternoon, no free activities on weekends, no free special events like Bug Bonanza or the beloved Countdown to 12 New Year Celebration, each featuring face painting, craft stations, and educational activities. With only admission costs, we wouldn't be able to develop the Westbury School District STEM program or offer sensory-friendly nights for families with children on the autism spectrum. This is where school group tours, scout group visits, museum rentals, generous donors, memberships and much needed grant funding come in to close the gap. This wonderful support is vital to offering visitors of all ages the opportunity to explore freely and discover their passions, both within our walls and with us out in the community. Because we see 250,000 visitors every year, our hands-on museum (like all hands-on museums) will often see favorite pieces in and out of commission throughout the day, but we’re out there getting them up and ready for action again every week. We welcome any of our visitors to please inform our staff about any items in need of attention. We’d be sure to give it the TLC it deserves! We hope this clarifies a little bit of how our non-profit runs and would love to see you again soon. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us. Kind regards, Melissa S Long Island Children's Museum https://instagram.com/longislandchildrensmuseum https://www.facebook.com/LICMpage