In May 1969, Fred McFeeley Rogers, host of the nationally syndicated series Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, appeared in front of the U.S. Senate on behalf of PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In a six-minute speech, he impressed upon the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Media the need for youngsters’s content that captured “the inner drama of childhood,” by speaking “to it constructively.”
By the tip of his speech, Rogers had secured the support of Chairman John Pastore and $20 million in funding, which the Nixon administration had sought to chop in half.
If only such tactics could work now. After a long time of heading off defunding attempts, the CPB saw its board formally vote to dissolve last month after Congress’ rescission of all federal funding last yr.
But its beneficiary PBS Kids stays. Public TV’s educational media brand for youngsters 2-8 has long carried Mr. Rogers spiritual successors Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Donkey, alongside
Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow and Arthur, into 95% of U.S. households. The brand continues to keep up its commitment to viewer access, with recent ASL episodes and industry-leading research on child development, literacy and even AI.
“The majority of funding and public media budgets really comes from viewers such as you,” says PBS Kids’ Senior Vice President and General Manager Sara DeWitt. “So at this moment, we’re still in a position to distribute PBS Kids, and we’re offering these stations a full lineup of programming over the air and thru live linear feeds, the 24/7 channel that we provide, and the streaming services which might be all co-branded to that station. We’re still here.” That presence stretches to 2 recent shows premiering this winter, the recently debuted reading-centric animated show Phoebe & Jay, a couple of pair of young siblings and their apartment-building neighbors, and the March premiere of Madge’s World.
That’s despite the termination of the $112 million “Able to Learn” grant, which funded programmers’ creation of curriculum-based educational content to handle the school-readiness gap for elementary and preschool-aged kids. Those cuts which have resulted in a 30% reduction in personnel and greater than 80 gaming titles already faraway from the PBS Kids website and mobile app.
DeWitt spoke with THR about how the youngsters’ programming leader — whose Able to Learn-funded shows reached 36 million TV viewers and earned 1.8 billion video streams throughout the 2023-2024 season alone — is working to make “sure that we’re staying true to our mission, even with fewer dollars.”
How and what has the Able to Learn Grant termination impacted since last yr?
It really hit us hard in the academic outreach and research spaces. All of that work was funded by the federal government, and numerous it was funded through that grant. We also had to have a look at where we felt like PBS and our mission are, and what most differentiates us on this market. What we see in the entire outpouring of emails and social media messages we’re getting is that we’re educational and our shows are putting kids at the middle. So how can we ensure we maintain that, even when we will’t do as much of it? We did should cut staff across the entire department, however it was eager about, if we’re doing less of this, how can we ensure we still have everybody we’d like to achieve kids where they’re at. We’re the primary trusted brand amongst parents, so we couldn’t cut any corners on anything that’s going to remove from that.
PBS Kids has long been defined by its educational commitment to diverse young viewers. For people unfamiliar, how have you ever historically used that grant funding to create content reflective of that?
The mission is to be relevant to all of America’s children. We would like kids to see themselves, and in addition to see the lives of other kids and understand what those experiences are like. We’re creator-driven, so we sometimes issue an RFP [request for proposal] around a curriculum area if we feel like there’s a spot, if there’s something that we all know kids particularly need, but we don’t exit and say, “We’re searching for a show that’s exactly like this.” We would like a creator to return to us with characters and stories which might be authentic to their experiences and tell stories that might be reflective of the lives of youngsters within the U.S. Able to Learn funded Molly of Denali, and while some people said, “Oh, that’s so narrow,” since it’s a couple of kid in Alaska, I heard from general managers of stations in the midst of the country saying Molly‘s really resonating here since it’s the one show that depicts rural life really authentically.
How is your pipeline for 2026 and even 2027 affected?
We’ve got an extended development process at PBS because we work with academic advisors, and do numerous research and testing with kids. So we might be seeing gaps as we glance further into the long run. That Able to Learn grant we’ve had since 1995 often could fund two to 3 series, and immediately, we’re going to be half of that. Phoebe & Jay is our last show funded by Able to Learn. When that grant was terminated, we were in a position to finish out this series with huge because of several foundations who helped us close a few of that funding gap, and since we were far enough along in production, we could launch it. [But] we’ve got things in development that we’ve needed to placed on pause, and we’ve got things in development that we now are attempting to fundraise against and see if there are methods we will do some testing to ensure we’re on the fitting track and might move forward. The query is where and the way the gap goes to hit, depending on the event timeline and the brand new things which might be launching. We’re also probably going to take into consideration rolling things out over an extended time period, so not as many recent episodes as quickly. But we’ve got to ensure that works for youths. Sometimes that depends upon the show or on the age range that we’re targeting.
There have been reports in December that an Arkansas station was replacing PBS with locally created content following the funding loss. How are your local affiliates being affected and responding?
I actually have an advisory committee of stations that I meet with quarterly, and we grapple with various things. You’ve got any person from Arizona there, any person from Kentucky, any person from Alaska — people across the country saying, “Here’s how this could work in my area. I wouldn’t do that. I might do that.” They’re giving us feedback and are weighing in. Also they are those who take it out into communities, which the Able to Learn grant funded. In some cases, it was partnering with the libraries or taking things into aftercare programs. In other cases, it’s taking it to the housing authority. Some stations have big partnerships with the Boys and Girls Clubs. Our member station in South Carolina did some amazing things through teacher networks, ensuring that we’re reaching the youngsters who could most profit from a show like Lyla within the Loop, where they will see role models in STEM and get a few of those early computer programming skills. It’s such an asset, and in lots of cases, that is the last locally owned and operated station in numerous communities. What we’re seeing immediately with the lack of the federal funding and Able to Learn is a matter of how lots of the stations are going to have the ability to proceed to try this deep work.
That Arkansas station also announced it might begin creating its own kids’ programming. In your opinion, what can the youngsters’ space potentially lose by way of quality control when communities stop getting your content and approach?
Once I began on this industry, for those who desired to create a show or for those who desired to create a game, you had so many gatekeepers you needed to undergo, and when you created it, you were on platforms that had a ton of guardrails inbuilt. You had to fulfill certain standards of not being too business. You had to observe how things were being sold inside it. As soon as COPPA [Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act] got here out, there have been all these regulations around what you would and couldn’t collect, what you would and couldn’t do on this space. Today, content could be created by anybody and uploaded on a platform that has almost no regulations for youngsters and is being self-tagged by the individuals who upload it. They’ll say it’s educational, even when it’s not. That is where I feel like we’d like PBS Kids even greater than ever. After we launched Weather Hunters [in September], and it had really great numbers out of the gate, it showed that there’s a desire for that content. Parents want something that isn’t being driven by an algorithm, that isn’t being driven solely to generate more revenue.
PBS Kids has been doing work around programming and AI research. How are you navigating using AI, and the way can your funding losses on this space affect an industry with virtually no shared standards for youngsters?
What we’re eager about is all of that co-viewing research that has been around for a long time, and commenced with shows like Sesame Street. University of California Irvine and Harvard University have a National Science Foundation grant working with us to develop conversations with characters when you’re watching. It began with Elinor Wonders Why, which is a science show. The episode pauses, Elinor breaks the fourth wall and asks the youngsters a matter about what’s happening, after which creates some conversation. “What’s your hypothesis? How would you make that sauce come out of the bottle faster?” All of that was not generative. The AI is about parsing the youngsters’ language and finding the fitting answer that was then written by the scriptwriters. There’s [also] a follow-on with Lyla within the Loop on computational considering for barely older kids in the sector immediately. One of these AI usage can really help us higher think concerning the educational possibilities of media. We’ve also been using machine learning in our learning analytics platform for a really very long time, the large takeaways being about how a toddler signals they understand an idea in a game. One other thing can also be ensuring in our storytelling that we’re eager about the world through which kids live. We’ve got several shows about how this explosion of AI is relevant to kids’ lives. In Work It Out Wombats! there’s a bit chatbot that the youngsters are fidgeting with, and so they begin to wonder what the constraints of this are versus their friends.
PBS Kids has led in content accessibility for a long time. Are you able to check with me about how accessibility lives within the brand and what’s facing cuts?
It’s in our DNA, and it’s a part of what having a non-commercial lens on things allows us to give attention to. Public media pioneered closed captioning, and it takes a non-commercial entity to acknowledge how critically necessary a service like that might be. We’ve also been eager about children on the autism spectrum who can have sensory accommodations and built a gaming overlay that permits kids to vary depending on how they best learn. The tools that we’ve created are deployed, and we’re maintaining those tools. The thing that’s most in danger immediately is sustained research and development. What’s the following thing we wish to attempt to research? The opposite piece of accessibility for us is about kids who’ve broadband. Almost every house has access to streaming, but in some cases, that signal isn’t very strong, or there’s just one device in the home. We’re eager about those third and fourth-generation devices, those kids are more than likely to be using. The power to download content when you’ve got strong Wi-Fi and play even once you don’t have it’s one in every of the primary things that we’re having to chop since it takes so many resources to maintain that operational. We’re starting to have a look at all of different pieces and what else we will do.
What are all of the funding options you’re considering?
Straight away, we’ve got to take into consideration all the things. Certainly one of the things terminated was the expansion of our American Sign Language interpreted episodes, and a significant donor helped us finish that work so we will launch that library of ASL episodes. But we’re going to should think greater than that and in alternative ways because I’m unsure that philanthropy can fill this hole by itself. We’ve got fewer staff, so we’re already having to do it that way, but we’re also eager about other forms of partnerships for distribution. That is an area I take into consideration in the sport space. In relation to a library of math games that could possibly be supplemental to assist support knowledge in an after-school program, that may be a business opportunity. We’re also eager about storytelling, and that’s where we’d like to fundraise, particularly for our slowing production pipeline. There are such a lot of things kids can learn from, even in the event that they were created 10 years ago, but we’ve got to be creating recent content to essentially meet their needs today. We’re a trusted space. We’re utilized in schools. We’ve got a sturdy library of educational content that has just about all been funded by the federal government. But this may be the purpose where we take a look at business partners, ad tech corporations. We actually are attempting to take into consideration things in ways in which we never have before.