Kate Wells has made the Walter Cronkite School her home since coming to work for Channel 8 KAET as an associate general manager in April.
She works in a corner office on the fifth floor of the building. It’s an average-sized office, adorned with artwork collected from travels around the globe. Photos of her family, including her two daughters, Tessa and Phoebe, rest on her desk.
The best part of her office? It’s only a few blocks away from the Children’s Museum of Phoenix, a place Wells helped raise $30 million to create.
“We wanted an educational place for kids to play and grow up as arts consumers,” said Wells, a founding member of the museum. “We all had a vision. It needed to be something truly spectacular.”
Wells and the museum’s other founding members first had the idea for the museum after a visit to San Diego’s children museum. But opening a new museum in the heart of a then-lifeless downtown Phoenix was no easy task.
Though founded in 1998 as the Phoenix Family Museum, it would take Wells and a small group of founding members ten years before the museum would finally open to the public in June 2008, a date closely coinciding with the Cronkite School’s opening downtown just two months later.
The museum, located on the corner of Seventh and Van Buren streets, promotes a hands-on environment to stimulate many different types of learning that children have. Though only open for a little more than three years, the museum has already garnered national acclaim, including being named one of the country’s ten best children’s museums earlier this year by Parenting magazine.
“Classrooms only engage a few intelligences,” said Wells, who advocates the multiple intelligences theory. “At the museum, our goal was for each exhibit to touch on three to four intelligences, so no matter what they will be learning.”
After the museum’s opening, Wells soon grew tired of the daily operations and decided to leave for something new.
“I left with two treasures,” she said. “We helped bring childhood development to the agendas of businessmen, governors and community members, and we moved the needle in early childhood education changing the perception and dialogue.”
Accepting the position at Channel 8 has allowed Wells to continue her passion for children by helping to educated 450,000 kids a day. It’s a new role Wells fits into comfortably.
“There is a sense of cohesion,” co-worker Joanna Cruz Benton said about the addition of Wells to the staff. “She is always trying to better each situation.”
Wells draws a lot of her enthusiasm for her new job from the students who populate the Cronkite School.
“It was sad when the students were gone for summer,” she said. “You get a nice synergy with the park, the dorms, the downtown YMCA. It’s fun.”
Cronkite students have a large impact on the station in regard to production, Wells said, admitting she is amazed at how many students are helping to produce shows and working cameras and soundboards.
Despite her passion for her new job and the students she works with, Wells still reminisces back to the days of fundraising and “championing the cause” of the museum. With it only blocks away, it’s unsurprising Wells still thinks of her old home.
“My daughter Phoebe pointed out the window one day and said, ‘That’s the museum my mom built for me,’” Wells said. “That’s why I built it … I wanted to create the world my kids grow up in.”
Contact the reporter at michelle.rivas@asu.edu
