COVID-19 taught hands-on institutions many lessons they will carry past the pandemic – Oklahoman.com

The places to go and the things to see arehallmarks inevery community, bringing people together to learn, to play, to watch, to create.

Two years ago, all of that came to a stand-still, and the institutions that provide those opportunities have pivoted, adjusted and evolved since.

This is true for places that thrive on up-close and personalopportunities, like Science Museum Oklahoma and the wide-open (indoor and outdoor)spaces at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Even the Oklahoma City Zoo had its own hurdles in caring for species vulnerable to the virus.

And then there are places thatopened in the midst of the pandemic that had to balance successful openings against health guidelines, like OKC'sFirst Americans Museum.

As Oklahomans and the folks that run community institutions like these look back on two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are taking lessons with them into the future.

"It's just been a ... huge joy as an institution to see how our staff could step up and be creative and produce innovative programming that we've never had the opportunity to do before," Science Museum Oklahoma President and CEO Sherry Marshall said.

When Oklahoma businesseswere shuttered in March2020, some moved to work remotely andmany people lost jobs, while others continued work that was deemed essential.

For the Oklahoma City Zoo, animal caretakers fell under the latter category.

The weeks that followed were exhausting as the zoo created an A-B schedule, said Dr. Jennifer D'Agostino, the zoo's director of veterinary services. This meant fewer people would be working together and fewerpeople would be required to quarantine if someone got sick but their shifts increased from eight hours to 10.

"Everybody pulled together and did a great job, but it certainly was tiring,"D'Agostino said. "And that's something that wasn't sustainable long term."

Meanwhile, each institution began preparing to reopen safely when the time came.

Science Museum Oklahoma was already in the process of updating its air handling systems, which was a big step towardfeeling comfortable bringing people back in the building, Marshall said. Upgrades included an increase in fresh air circulation and needlepoint by polar ionization systems, she said.

The museum also added additional cleaning schedules, ordered hand sanitizer by the 55-gallon bucket,placed sanitization stations throughout the building and put up barriers at the ticket booth and the cafe.

Both the sanitizing wipe stations and the plastic barriers were designed and built in-house by the museums exhibit shop team, Marshall said.

"Alot of these protections that were put in place because of the pandemic are really smart, and we'll continue them in the future," she said."Because when you do deal with nearly 600,000 people every year, that's a lot of exposure."

Cowboy museum director Natalie Shirley said the museum reopened in mid-May 2020. With more than 200,000 square feet including gallery space and the outdoor Liichokoshkomo area for kids to learn and play Shirley said it was easy for visitors tosocial distance.

The museum received recognitionfrom the American Alliance of Museums for its COVID-19 safety messaging, playfully called "The Cowboy Way."

Signs posted at the museum reminded guests that wearing masks, giving each other space and cleaning up when possible were things every good cowboy would do. This creative take on safety protocolsmade it easy to communicate the serious topic to guests, Shirley said.

"We got very little pushback, because it was just clever and fun," Shirley said.

While the cowboy museum was figuring out how to safely reopen, the First Americans Museum was still being completed. Whether it was working around supply chain issues, ensuring construction workers stayed healthy or conducting hiring interviews over Zoom, museum deputy director Shoshana Wasserman said it was a trying time.

At each stage of the pandemic, as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local guidelines updated, Wasserman said museum leaders concocted new opening plans.

"The plan itself had to be redone, re-conceptualized so many different times, all the way up to about a week out of the event. ... We didn't even know what our capacities were within our building because we hadn't operated in our building yet," Wasserman said.

And as national and local health guidelines have evolved during the last two years, so have the guidelines and knowledge around animal vulnerability to COVID-19.

Zoos were initially most worried about primates because they are close relatives to humans, D'Agostino said. Caretaking staff began using gloves and wearing masks when working with those animals, but eventually that extended to cats, as well.

To date, no OKC Zoo animals have tested positive for the virus, D'Agostino said.

The zoo vaccinated 40 animals in October with the animal approved COVID-19 vaccine, includingall of its primates, cats, river otters and ferrets.

Caretakers still use masks and gloves with the vulnerable animals, D'Agostinoadded.

As of March, masks were still encouraged at the First Americans Museum, Science Museum Oklahoma and in indoor zoo habitats andbuildings.

As the world shifted online, everyone had to adapt. It was important to keep the community feeling connected, and that took different forms for each institution.

For the cowboy museum, that meant "handing" itsTwitter over to head of security Tim Tiller, who became known worldwide for his tweets as "Cowboy Tim" using #HashtagTheCowboy.

The museum's Twitter following went from less than 10,000 before the pandemic to its current number of more than 280,000. Twitter users can still see daily tweets with the tell-tale cowboy coffee mug that are signed "Thanks, Tim," highlightingpaintings and other artifacts from across the museum.

Many parents, teachers and students also were navigating online school for the first time in the early stages of the pandemic,and the demand for online educational resources soared.

Science Museum Oklahoma filled this need through "SMO At Home," a collection of science activities and experiments with common household items.

"Schools are continuing to use these videos as resources in their in their science classrooms," Marshall said."It's one of those things where we always wanted to do it, but never really had the time or the resources."

The cowboy museum's annual "Prix de West Invitation Art Exhibition & Sale" became "Purely Proxy Prix de West" and was held in September 2020. The sale is the museum's largest fundraiser, Shirley said.

Rather than being a one-day event, the gallery was opened up to small, in-person and virtual tours over a few weeks. People appreciated this so much that the museum continued that in 2021 and will in the future, Shirley said.

"They actually get time to spend with the paintings, and they loved it," she said.

OKC Zoo CEO Dwight Lawson said it was inspiring to see how his stafffound creative solutions, like a drive-thru zoo plan that was put together in 2020 before the zoo found out it could open soon.

But the plan came in handy when the zoo decked the grounds with lights at Christmas and could offer the drive-thru option, Lawson said.

The zoo, as an outdoor venue, has been one people felt safer to return to and has "bounced back strong," Lawson said

Opening in the midst of the pandemic taught the First Americans Museum staff to always beprepared for multiple possible outcomes, Wasserman said.

"The one thing you can count on is that you will create a plan, and it will have to change many times," she said.

But, Wasserman added, this is nothing new for those that have been involved with the museum project for long. More than two decades of planning led up to the museum's September 2021 opening.

It's also nothing new for tribal members"to be challenged and to persevere," Wasserman said.In fact, it's what the museum is about: how tribal nations have overcome what's been thrown at them and persist to this day.

"Our histories have been so tragic and triumphant," Wasserman said. "We have often had to respond to different federal policy, being moved and uprooted from original homelands to displaced. So I think we have a long history and there's some hereditary memory thatcarried from generation to generation ofbeing responsive to change."

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COVID-19 taught hands-on institutions many lessons they will carry past the pandemic - Oklahoman.com