At Whitaker: The sounds of business

The excited screams and laughter were a good sign for the nonprofit arts, education and cultural center, which is well into its busy season for hosting school field trips from across Central Pennsylvania.

And despite obstacles like the recent state budget crisis, which left many schools re-thinking field trips and other expenses as funding uncertainty loomed, field-trip attendance at the Harrisburg center for 2015-2016 is on pace with last school year’s figure of approximately 36,000 students.

While the center sees school groups pretty much year-round, the height of field trip season is in the spring, said Ashlee Hurley, the facility’s director of marketing and sales.

Each spring, “it’s common for us to welcome around 1,000 students per day. Schools see these trips as essential educational tools because of the unique hands-on-learning environment” at Whitaker, Hurley said.

Popular offerings at Whitaker include: Harsco Science Center and its three floors of interactive STEM-based exhibits; educational documentaries in Whitaker’s Select Medical Digital Cinema, which has the largest movie screen in this part of the state; “Discovery Labs,” offering topics for students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade; and “Surgery Live!”

This latter feature is geared toward high school students interested in the health care field, and features simulcasts of live surgeries from Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, Hurley continued.

Also, some 7,000 elementary- and secondary-school students attended performances last school year at Whitaker’s Sunoco Performance Theater, which features everything from classical chamber music and theater to ballet.

It is composed of three main venues — Sunoco Performance Theater, Select Medical Digital Cinema, and Harsco Science Center. More than 450,000 students have visited its science center.

Since opening in 1999, it has hosted more than four million visitors, its officials said.