Public Broadcasting Reaffirms Commitment to Education

(August 29, 2003)  In this month's Center for Instructional Communication (CIC) conference call, Skip Hinton, president of the National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) assured participants that action items from the recent NETA Education Leadership Summit are "front and center and already moving forward. How we allocate our time and energies to accomplish these very important public broadcasting education initiatives is on the agenda of every major meeting on our calendar now," he said.
    

The "first of its kind" Summit, which was held July 26-27 in Tucson, Arizona, was attended by more than 200 public television station general managers, education directors, outreach professionals, and instructional media distributors. They discussed stations’ education services and strategies to meet communities’ changing education needs. Sessions addressed how public television, in this time of diminishing resources, can provide services to assist local educators who are struggling with technological and economic education issues.
   
"The Summit was not only informational, it was inspirational. It was the beginning of the kind of collaboration that we need to make our educational work more effective," said NETA Board Chair Deborah Onslow.
  
"The Summit participants became stakeholders in public broadcasting’s educational focus for the future. They reached some much-needed ‘common understandings’ that will guide us as we look to NETA for support for new education initiatives. There was also agreement on the need for a ‘clearinghouse’ to enable stations to share plans, successes, and challenges related to education services," said Mac Wall, executive director/CEO of The Kentucky Network.
  
Innovative educational projects demonstrated at the Association of Public Television Stations’ (APTS) Ed-Tech & Ice Cream event on Capitol Hill September 3 will be considered for inclusion in work to achieve Summit action items. The Organization of State Broadcasting Executives (OSBE) will address Summit action items at their meeting September 4-6 in San Jose, California. When the NETA Executive Committee meets in Columbia, South Carolina September 6-9, it will determine how Summit actions items can be incorporated in NETA’s new strategic plan.
  
On September 12, staff members from NETA, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) will meet to more closely define the roles of the national organizations as they relate to public television licensees’ educational services. Representatives of these organizations will discuss Summit action items and determine responsibilities, such as research, teachers’ professional development, funding sources, digital delivery models, and metadata standards.
   
 Hey!   The Summit Web was last updated on 9/8/03.        Check the Updates.