It is owned and operated by the DeKalb County School District, which announced in May 2012 it was considering closing the facility to cut its annual budget, then quickly shelved the plan after public outcry.

The nearby Fernbank Museum of Natural History is a private non-profit organization that is separate from the Science Center.

The Fernbank Science Center opened in December 1967, and is an educational facility and an integral part of the DeKalb County School District.

Fernbank contains many materials for instruction, including dinosaur skeletons, rocks and minerals, a collection of tektites, an Aeronautics Education Laboratory and an electron microscope lab.

[2] In 2012 Fernbank Science Center was the recipient of a grant from Lockheed Martin which was used to refurbish the Jim Cherry Memorial Planetarium, and give the theater a technological upgrade bringing it into the 21st century and the digital age.

[3] Prior to the 2012 upgrade, Fernbank staff had been using standard projectors for the video portions of the shows, which put an image on only a small segment of the dome.

During their original tenure from 2004-2014, LINKS had been one of the more successful BEST Teams in Georgia, consistently qualifying for the South's BEST Regional Championship at Auburn University.