The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 154

0 Kichard Nugent Leonard Press, executive director of KET-TV, at studios in Lexington, Ky. THE OTHER TV Many Kentucky children are plugged into KET, the nation's largest state educational network. You are, too even if you don't watch it with your taxes. By JOHN ED PEARCE since the 1950s, when it was only an idea. Like other states, Kentucky was trying to cope with too many postwar school problems with too little money and too few teachers.

The state was short of certified teachers. It didn't have special classes or adult education. Small schools couldn't offer courses or instruction to equip students for college. )UT people were looking at the new Not everyone is so enthusiastic. Some broadcasters charge that tax-supported KET is unfair competition.

Others complain that KET buildings and equipment are too lavish, and that many of its programs are "over the heads" of most people. State legislators have charged that KET public-affairs programs favor the party in power in Frankfort. Such charges jangle the nerves of O. Leonard Press, the suave, dapper, articulate former Bostonian who as KET's executive director steers it through the minefield of Kentucky education and politics. Not only must he please officials and students at the 75 per cent of Kentucky schools that use KET, he also must win the state's financial support without letting KET become political.

And he must expand the network and its programming without raising the hackles of influential TV station owners. Press has been associated with KET ARE YOU a little tired of television? A Of Starsky and Hutch, Laverne and Shirley, blood and sex, trivia and poor taste? There is an alternative, you know. It is Kentucky Educational Television. Because of that word "educational," you may not pay much attention to KET, but if you live in Kentucky you have a stake in it. Your taxes help support it.

If you have children in the public schools, it helps to educate them. It is the largest state-educational network in the nation. Although it was created primarily to benefit schoolchildren, it has proved an equal blessing to grown-ups, or so say KET supporters. Its evening, or non-instructional programs, they declare, are not only more mature and substantial than the mush served by commercial TV, but also more entertaining. JOHN ED PEARCE is on the Magazine staff.

Bert Combs, who was governor at the time, Jefferson County school superintendent Richard VanHoose, and Courier-Journal television columnist Bill Ladd began selling the idea of a statewide network. That is where Press and Ronald Stewart, then on the UK radio-film staff, came in, designing what came to be known as the Kentucky Plan. They presented it to the legislature in 1960, and it was handed to the Legislative Research Commission for study. The study proved to be something more than a means to delay. The LRC decided TV might be an answer to some of the worst school problems, and in 1962 the legislature created the Kentucky Authority for Educational Television, which is still the governing board of KET.

Combs gave it a million dollars to get started, but it was a slow start, and it wasn't until 1968 that KET got on the Continued fangled television as a possible educational weapon. A televised lecture could put an excellent teacher before thousands of students and for less than the cost of an incompetent teacher facing a handful. Already Jefferson County was experimenting with a closed-circuit television system, and at the University of Kentucky Dr. Charles Snow was lecturing to 500 students at a time over station WLEX. The response in both cases was good.

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