A Kentucky TV treasure is threatened

This state doesn’t lead the nation in many aspects of education.

But Kentucky Educational Television has, over the past 40 years, been one of America’s most innovative and admired public TV systems.

KET produces more hours of programming and creates more instructional materials than almost anyone else.

“Around the country, everyone wants to grow up to be KET,” said Mac Wall, the executive director.

But that could change, if Kentucky isn’t careful.

State budget cuts have hit KET especially hard. About $2.4 million was sliced from KET’s appropriation for the coming year. Changes in state employee benefits have given many of KET’s veteran staff members little choice but to retire. About a fifth of KET’s 220 employees will be gone by December, including 10 who were laid off last week.

Among the biggest hits: Half of KET’s 12 program producers are leaving.

“These are really invaluable human assets that they are going to be losing,” said Leonard Press, KET’s founding executive director, who retired in 1992. “The loss of what they could have done for Kentucky will never be recovered. Time lost is tragic.”

It’s too early to say what all of this will mean to KET consumers in schools and living rooms across the state. Network executives are working on a plan that will be presented to the agency’s governing board in October.

State funding accounts for 52 percent of KET’s $25.5 million annual budget. The rest comes from fund-raising (17 percent), federal money (15 percent), grants and other revenue (16 percent).

“We will be helped a lot by new technology and what that will bring in terms of efficiencies,” said Shae Hopkins, KET’s deputy director. “But it still takes a producer to find a story and tell that story.”

What is happening at KET has set off alarms across the Public Broadcasting System.

“I’m deeply concerned about the impact these budget cuts may have,” said Paula Kerger, who has toured KET twice since becoming PBS’s president two years ago.

“If the long-term consequences of these cuts are not carefully considered, I worry they may diminish the impressive gains KET has made — especially in serving the state’s children. If further cuts are made, it would be a great loss not only to Kentucky, but also to public broadcasting as a whole.”

More than TV shows

I remember when KET first went on the air in September 1968. Cardinal Valley Elementary got several big black-and-white TVs on carts that teachers wheeled into class. If Mrs. Dawson timed our fourth-grade class just right — and if she could get the rabbit-ear antenna adjusted just so — we could watch a dowdy lady on KET’s one channel do science experiments.

Believe it or not, at the time, that was impressive.

Of course, that was years before Sesame Street helped teach my daughters to count and spell, Reading Rainbow fueled their love of books and Inspector Morse and Prime Suspect hooked me on British detective dramas.

Most Kentuckians know KET through those shows, and some of the 1,200 hours of original programming the staff creates each year: Kentucky Life, Comment on Kentucky, Kentucky Tonight, On to One, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the General Assembly and documentaries such as Where the River Bends: A History of Northern Kentucky.

KET has aggressively explored Kentucky’s history, celebrated its culture and created the kind of public affairs programs that commercial TV news has all but abandoned.

“Local production is the most expensive programming you can put on the air,” Wall said. “But it’s also the most important, the most relevant.”

What’s on your TV is only the beginning of KET.

In addition to the KET1 and KET2 channels, the network operates a channel just for schools and a new digital Kentucky Channel.

KET’s new EncycloMedia is a comprehensive online service with thousands of videos, photos, quizzes and lesson plans that Kentucky teachers can download and use. KET produces for-credit college courses, educational content for state prisoners and professional development materials for teachers.

KET developed study materials that have helped more than 1 million adults nationwide — including more than 20,000 in Kentucky — earn their high-school equivalency degrees. The staff will soon begin a $6 million project to update those materials to reflect changes being made in GED tests in 2012.

New Equipment

Ironically, KET’s loss of staff and experience comes as the network is installing millions of dollars worth of new digital equipment, bought with money appropriated by previous legislative sessions.

“We’re now able to do the things that Len Press envisioned 40 years ago, but the technology and the capacity didn’t exist then,” Wall said.

KET will have the equipment, but it will have a smaller staff with less experience left to use it.

Times are tight, and Kentucky leaders face difficult decisions about how to raise and spend taxpayers’ money.

Can this state still afford to maintain a first-class educational resource like KET?

It can’t afford not to.