Longtime director leaving Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose

When San Jose’s Children Discovery Museum recently replaced the giant, inflatable rubber duck that serves as its rooftop mascot, kids noticed. Quite frankly, they were a little concerned and wanted to know what happened to the old one.

The marketing department came up with a tale to satisfy their curiosity. Discovery Duck, they said, had retired to a pondside community in Denver to be closer to her grandchildren.

That, of course, is also what they could say about Marilee Jennings, who is stepping down this month after 39 years with the downtown learning center, including the past 18 as its executive director. She’s off to Colorado to be closer to her grandkids, ages 3½ and 3 months.

“Our stories are fully aligned,” said Jennings, who started as the museum’s head fundraiser about three years before its landmark purple building opened in 1990 at Discovery Meadow Park.

During Jennings’ decades at CDM, the museum has both physically grown and evolved in how it approaches teaching children about the world around them. That included the expansion of outdoor spaces with Bill’s Backyard: Bridge to Nature in 2017 and the Exploration Portal in 2024. Jennings also helped build a relationship with Zoom that led to the Children’s Discovery Museum Zoom Zone at the San Jose Mineta International Airport.

“I think the happiest an exhibit has made me was opening Bill’s Backyard,” Jennings said. “I think it was the exact right thing to do at the time we did it for where kids are in needing to play outside, helping parents feel comfortable, that their children can kind of maneuver the natural world.”

Jennings says she still gets excited by the sound of the museum coming alive each day with kids. But her favorite day in the museum every year is the annual Three Kings celebration in January, which started about three decades ago as an outreach to the Latino community.

“It is just an extraordinary event and the thousands of people in the community pour out for it,” Jennings said. “It’s just a joyful day where people of Latino descent can take great pride in this celebration, and people who are not of that community can learn more about it.”

And it’s led to other daylong cultural festivals like the Lunar New Year event held last weekend and the celebration of Nowruz, the Persian new year, in the spring.

Longtime board member Dan Amend called Jennings one of his favorite people in the world, who exhibits thoughtfulness and kindness at her core. He marveled at her tenacity at a time when the city’s cultural institutions were under fire and accompanied her on a “road show” of City Hall offices where she told the museum’s story to elected officials again and again.

“I think her impact has been both a fortifying of the institution as well as inspirational and unprecedented leadership and guidance,” said Amend, who is president and CEO of commercial real estate firm ACRE Investments.

In honor of Jennings’ leadership and the museum’s 35th anniversary, the Marilee Jennings Future 35 Fund has been established to give her fans a way to secure Children’s Discovery Museum’s future. You can find out more at www.cdm.org/marilee-jennings-future-35-fund.

Jennings’ successor is expected to be announced in the coming weeks, and she has advice for that person.

“The community comes first. Let that be your North Star,” she said. “We spend a lot of time here reminding one another that our purpose is actually about children, children’s curiosity and creativity. It’s not about imparting facts and figures and miscellaneous skills. It’s about responding to what the child needs in order to grow and become successful.

“When we look into this community, we see extraordinary ethnic diversity. We see amazing artists, innovative scientists,” she said. “So that’s why I say let the community drive where the museum is.”

TECHNOLOGY IS FOR LOVERS: The Tech Interactive is another downtown San Jose institution that’s popular with the younger set, but it’ll be opening its doors Thursday night exclusively to grown-ups ages 21 and up for Tech at Nite: Love Lab,” a Valentine’s Day-themed edition of the popular evening experience.

Besides having the run of the Tech’s regular exhibits, visitors can enjoy music by Universal Grammar’s DJ Chalé Brown and Zuri Alexa, a light and fluid art workshop by led Combsy the Chemist and Local Color, specialty cocktails and even a DIY “love potion” fragrance lab. It runs from 7 to 10:30 p.m., and tickets are available at www.thetech.org/techatnite.

WASN’T THE SUPER BOWL ENOUGH?: Grammy Award-winning band Los Tigres del Norte participated in a panel discussion after Monday night’s Warriors game and is set to return to the arena for a concert on Feb 20. That’s all fine and good, but the band — which made it big in San Jose in the late 1960s — also received the key to the city from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie on Monday. Of course, Los Tigres are deserving of any honor they get, but this seems like a little payback for the Grateful Dead ceremony that San Jose had at City Hall back in December, doesn’t it?