By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Summer vacation is no time for kids to stop learning. Too many children, however, experience “the summer slide” when they regress in learning.
That’s especially true of students who can’t access summer enrichment activities, said Kelly Pheneger, WBGU-PBS Educational Services coordinator,.
That’s why WBGU-PBS is continuing its enlarged children’s block programming through the summer, and is introducing yet another service, Bright by Text, to encourage learning.
Pheneger said these efforts are all the more important this summer given students from pre-kindergarten through high school have been learning remotely since mid-March.
When schools shifted into online learning, Public Broadcasting, including WBGU-PBS, shifted along with them, devoting all its programming on both its main channel 27.1 and its Encore channel 27.2 to educational programming. Now with summer approaching “’it’s more important than ever to keep up with educational programming resources,” she said.
“It’s one of our attempts to bridge the digital divide,” she said, “because we know that 20 percent of the families in our viewing area lack access to internet connectivity.”
WBGU-PBS can be picked up over the air without cable.
So, from 6:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. the main channel offers children’s educational programming, and from noon to 5 p.m. Encore will offer programming for middle school and older children. Schedules are available at: wbgu.org/learnathome.
Since March, children, 6 to 11, are watching 300 percent more TV according to Nielsen, Pheneger said.
PBS is also connecting students to phone apps, almost all free, that can be downloaded when students have access to an internet hot spot and then played offline later “which is really helpful for families that don’t have internet connectivity,” or struggle with limited bandwidth.
Most families, she said, do have cell phones.
The Bright by Text service will send two to four texts a week to subscribers phones to access a curated set of educational and community resources, both national and regional. The service is geared for caregivers of children from prenatal up to age 8.
The goal is to provide a quick, yet trusted source for information. To sign up, text the keyword PBSKIDS to 274448. Participants can opt out at any time.
In announcing the new service, Pheneger stated: “The internet can be overwhelming, there is so much out there, parents or caregivers may not have the time to search or know which sites to trust. We want parents and caregivers to have easy access to tools to support their children at all stages.”
Bright by Text partners with national expert resources including PBS Kids, Vroom, Sesame Street and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to deliver its content. But it will also provide local information about, for example, the special exhibit on the Wood County Museum’s front porch.
Pheneger said the program will promote ways to support children’s development and activities they can participate in to enrich learning over the summer. But there will also be information about local food and health resources. That information can be tailored to the local needs of residents in the station’s 19-county viewing area.
This harks back to the early day of PBS when it began as educational TV.
Pheneger knows the importance of that. She grew up in rural Wood County. It was like being on an island. Her window on the world was WBGU. “Sesame Street” taught her about diversity, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about emotional and social awareness, and “Electric Company” promoted reading.
She is a living testimonial to the value of PBS, Pheneger said.
While some argue that PBS should just move its content to the internet, Pheneger said: “The data shows us that especially children from low income families are watching us over the air. We want to be careful as we move forward we don’t lose our viewers who watch us over the air. We want people to have connectivity but we’re not there yet.”
