Sesame Street Characters (L-R) Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and Abby Cadabby attend HBO Premiere of Sesame Street's The Magical Wand Chase at the Metrograph on November 9, 2017 in New York City. The show is one of many PBS Kids has helped shepherd over the years. Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment 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 necessity for children's content that captured "the inner drama of childhood," by speaking "to it constructively." By the end of his speech, Rogers had secured the support of Chairman John Pastore and $20 million in funding, which the Nixon administration had sought to cut in half. If only such tactics could work now. After decades of fending off defunding attempts, the CPB saw its board formally vote to dissolve last month after Congress' rescission of all federal funding last year. But its beneficiary PBS Kids remains. Public TV's educational media brand for children 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 maintain its commitment to viewer access, with new ASL episodes and industry-leading research on child development, literacy and even AI. Related Stories News Why MAGA-Boosting Comedy Bros Are Turning on Trump News Even the Right Wasn't So Sure About the Turning Point USA Halftime Show "The bulk of funding and public media budgets really comes from viewers like you," says PBS Kids' Senior Vice President and General Manager Sara DeWitt. "So at this moment, we are still able to distribute PBS Kids, and we are offering these stations a full lineup of programming over the air and through live linear feeds, the 24/7 channel that we offer, and the streaming services that are all co-branded to that station. We are still here." That presence stretches to two new shows premiering this winter, the recently debuted reading-centric animated show Phoebe & Jay, about a 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 "Ready to Learn" grant, which funded programmers' creation of curriculum-based educational content to address the school-readiness gap for elementary and preschool-aged kids. Those cuts that have resulted in a 30% reduction in personnel and more than 80 gaming titles already removed from the PBS Kids website and mobile app. DeWitt spoke with THR about how the kids' programming leader - whose Ready to Learn-funded shows reached 36 million TV viewers and earned 1.8 billion video streams during the 2023-2024 season alone - is working to make "sure that we are staying true to our mission, even with fewer dollars." How and what has the Ready to Learn Grant termination impacted since last year? It really hit us hard in the educational outreach and research spaces. All of that work was funded by the federal government, and a lot of it was funded through that grant. We also had to look at where we felt like PBS and our mission are, and what most differentiates us in this market. What we see in all of the outpouring of emails and social media messages we're getting is that we are educational and our shows are putting kids at the center. So how do we make sure we maintain that, even if we can't do as much of it? We did have to cut staff across the whole department, but it was thinking about, if we're doing less of this, how do we make sure we still have everybody we need to reach kids where they're at. We're the number one trusted brand among parents, so we couldn't cut any corners on anything that's going to take away from that. PBS Kids has long been defined by its educational commitment to diverse young viewers. For people unfamiliar, how have you historically used that grant funding to create content reflective of that?The mission is to be relevant to all of America's children. We want kids to see themselves, and also to see the lives of other kids and understand what those experiences are like. We are creator-driven, so we sometimes issue an RFP [request for proposal] around a curriculum area if we feel like there's a gap, if there's something that we know kids particularly need, but we don't go out and say, "We're looking for a show that's exactly like this." We want a creator to come to us with characters and stories that are authentic to their experiences and tell stories that will be reflective of the lives of kids in the U.S. Ready to Learn f