The Zoo in the City's School Life

Field trips by design; the 2025 education figures

Lead: Like the College Football Hall of Fame across town — whose history in this record tells how it ran on school field trips — the Potawatomi Zoo is built into South Bend's school life, and the master-plan era built that fact into brick: when the new front entry was designed in 2018, the zoo's own magazine noted that Phase I included "a separate entrance for field trips and group visits," a door of their own for the busloads of children who arrive class by class each spring and fall. The zoo's Education Department carries the institution out as well as in. The zoo's published figures for 2025 — the fullest education accounting it has released — give the scale: the Education Department interacted with 90,920 people in the year; conducted 645 programs; reached 30,542 people through programs taken offsite, into schools and community rooms the zoo's animals and educators travel to; engaged 1,084 children in its camps and classes; and was carried in part by 70 volunteers who donated 4,324 hours. Summer camps are a standing program in the zoo's own materials — Potawatomi Summer Camps recur in its publications across the years — and the department is headed, on the zoo's November 2026 staff list, by its Curator of Education, Amanda Brunson Cruz. No attendance-by-school or field-trip count is published in the sources reached for this history, and none is invented here; the zoo prints the design of its door and the reach of its programs, and this entry prints exactly that.

Sources:

1. Potawatomi Zoo, published 2025 education figures (90,920 people; 645 programs; 30,542 reached offsite; 1,084 children in camps and classes; 70 volunteers, 4,324 hours).
2. Potawatomi Zoo, Uproar, spring 2018 (the entry plaza's separate entrance for field trips and group visits).
3. Potawatomi Zoo staff list, November 2026 (Curator of Education Amanda Brunson Cruz); the zoo's published camp materials (Potawatomi Summer Camps).