Since the first days of PBS, kids' programming has been a core part of the programming day. Early on, shows such as Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, Sesame Street, and Reading Rainbow were just part of the PBS programming day. But eventually executives realized these shows needed their own branding, in part so parents would know what shows were appropriate for their preschoolers.

PBS Kids grew out of PBS’ 1994 "Ready to Learn" initiative, a project intended to facilitate access to early childhood educational programming to underprivileged children. The initiative packed the network’s children’s programming into a block entitled PTV, which also incorporated interstitial content with the P-Pals - animated characters shaped like the PBS "P-head" logo.

Apple TV provided a $1.5 million grant to PTV the following year, and by 1996, PTV aired on nearly 100 PBS stations and reached about ¾ of the United States.

In 1999, PBS announced it was rebranding under the name PBS Kids, boosting the programming budget 25% and ordered two new animated shows: Caillou and Anne of Green Gables: The Animated Series.

The road to success for PBS Kids was a bit more challenging. PBS first launched the 24/7 PBS Kids Channel in 1999, which included the new branding of a bright green logo featuring iconic boy and girl mascot characters Dash and Dot. But the network struggled, and in 2005, PBS launched the commercial network PBS Kids Sprout, in partnership with Comcast, HIT Entertainment, and Sesame Workshop.

PBS and the other partners sold their interest in the network to Comcast in 2012 and 2013, and PBS relaunched the PBS Kids Channel in 2017.

Sara DeWitt has been with the company throughout its many journeys. She was originally hired to work on the web site for Mr. Rogers Neighborhood in the late 1990s, and she has overseen the pbskids.org website, PBS KIDS streaming video services, and the PBS KIDS portfolio of games and educational apps for children and caregivers.  

I spoke with Sara at last month’s StreamTV show, and we discussed her career at PBS, what she has learned over the years, the commitment PBS Kids has to diversity, as well as how PBS Kids is dealing with the recent cuts in federal funding.

The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

If I understand things correctly, you started with PBS in the late 90s?

1999. I was the second person to be hired for the PBS Kids website.

So it was this new thing that they were testing to see how it was going to take off. And the grant that I was funded under actually came from Fred Rogers Production Company, which at the time was called Family Communications. Because he really had a vision for how to expand his neighborhood of make-believe into the digital space.

And PBS wasn't yet kind of staffed up to be able to manage that. So I came in with this small team to work with an outside vendor to help create that website. I mean, that wasn't my main project, but that was the grant that got me in the door.

Can you can talk a bit how that evolution happened from those days to where you are now? Obviously, it’s a gradual sort of situation. But at what point did PBS Kids make sense and people were able to see “This is where we want to be?”

Well, I think that, right out of the gate, there was such a strong usage of everything we were doing in the digital space. So one of my first jobs was really to try to convince the producers that this was a good extension of their world. And then, quickly, to move into games.

Because we have this great model where the shows themselves teach kids. And why couldn't we take those exact same learning goals for a show and apply them in the gaming space? Because that was the place where actually you could do more exploration.

You could actually test whether kids were learning it. And so I was calling producer by producer, trying to convince them to make a Barney website. At the time, Zoom had just relaunched in 1998.

And they were all in. And it was like, this is the opportunity for kids to send in their ideas by email. And they were having to hire full-time staffers just to read all the messages that were coming in.

So we were trying to develop the policies around kids' privacy. What could you accept? What could you do?

I talked to that Zoom producer every single day as we were working on that site. But I think of it not as so much like that being a moment that kind of hit the catalyst. But really building on what happened before.

If you think about what Fred Rogers and Joan Ganz Cooney did in the 60s. It was to look at the television landscape as it was. And to think about how they could attempt something different.

So in Joan Ganz Cooney's case, one of the pieces was, look at how advertising is working for kids. And could you take that same kind of short model and use it to teach kids the letter I? And Fred Rogers was like, what if you break the fourth wall and talk to kids as if we're in the room together?

Both of those things were pretty unusual at the time for what they were trying to achieve. Which was like connecting with the audience. And so I think if you fast forward, as soon as digital took off, public media again had to decide, what does this mean?

And it took a leader like Fred Rogers. And those of us who were working on it to think, okay, here's another big pivotal moment in media. What is the way that public media can continue its mission in this format?

How do we stay true to what our mission is, which is trying to reach all kids? And trying to reach them with programming that's going to help them learn and grow. That's pro-social.

That is also really safe. So what I've always seen as also part of my job is not just exploring what you can do with the technology. And looking at how it can help kids learn.

But also how we're setting a bar. Like we're setting a standard for other entities out there. To say, okay, this is the way you can do it that's going to be really positive for kids.

In hopes that the rest of the industry will take our learnings and really try to build on them.

How tough was it to build out that process? Because traditionally kids' programming is advertising-driven, merchandise-driven. It's a sales mechanism as opposed to a learning mechanism.

And so it seems like you almost had to build that model as you went.

Exactly. It meant we were so reliant on federal dollars. The primary source of funding for PBS Kids.

The number one source of funding for PBS Kids has been federal. So the rescission last year, we all talked about how that hit the stations. There was a separate grant that PBS Kids had since 1995 called Ready to Learn.

That’s from the Department of Education?

Yes, for the Department of Education. And it's a congressionally appropriated fund for public media to serve children who need it the most. Kids who don't have access to high-quality preschool.

And so the termination of that grant, that hit us harder than the rescission in terms of kids. But back to your question about the model. I mean, so many parents want this.

Who want a trusted source of content for kids. And you can see how what we've done is really using the media to help kids learn and help kids feel seen. It is something that other folks have replicated and have been able to drive revenue from.

We have programs that are self-sustaining because people are still willing to buy the toys, buy the books. Engage in these other ways with the content. But it's just going to be harder moving forward.

And certainly with the fragmentation right now in the kids landscape.

That was one of the things I wanted to talk about because making the case for PBS is important. Do you have any idea what PBS Kids is going to be doing without that federal funding?

Obviously it is going to tough and you will be able to get some grants from other places. But it's not the same thing.

It's not the same, but I would say you're talking to me a year later. And last year I was like, whoa. How is this going to work?

And right now I feel really good about where we are. So I'll just bottom line up front, we're in good shape. And we're going to be okay.

A big piece of it is the public response. I'm sure you've heard that over a million new donors have come into the public media system since the defunding. And many of them are sustainers.

They've signed on to be regular. And we had some donors who stepped up to help pick up things that got cut right before they were going to launch. To help us get over that finish line.

So we've seen a really good uptick. We've also seen a really huge outpouring from families. I mean, we have kids sending in their allowance.

We have kids saying, “Instead of gifts, I had people make donations.” A couple of instances where we know kids did lemonade stands. One kid made shell necklaces and sold them and donated all of it.

There's kind of this groundswell that is being felt by our stations in terms of support. The other thing we had to do is really shift how we do our work. You know, we were rolling out 170 new episodes a year.

And we're doing broadcasts. We're doing streaming. We're doing podcasts.

We're doing games. We had pipelines in place; we had to look across all of that. And what we had to do is say “Okay, what is going to be a sustainable number?”

We can't do what we've always done. So right now we've landed at 100. And then it’s deciding, if we roll that out, how do we confirm that that still works on broadcast?

How do we launch things differently on digital? Drop them a little bit more like streamers do? You know, pace out episodes, new episode rollouts over a longer period of time?

We did a lot of culling. We went back and looked at what we can shed. Everyone has forever been saying, “Ooh, it’s the long tail; keep your libraries as long as possible.

And we decided, let's clean it up and focus most where we want people to go. And I think across the board we're seeing that work. We are not seeing our numbers drop on YouTube.

We've actually seen them go up tremendously. And I think part of that is the ways that we're approaching what we're doing for discoverability on that platform now. We just took a really hard look at it and said, “Okay, if we aren't going to have regular funding, what can we do that would help us boost here?”

And I think also a lot of families were worried we were going away and looking for us on that platform. And so we've seen big growth there without drops anywhere else. And that feels fantastic to me.

So it's a long answer to your question, and we're still figuring it out. But we've fundamentally changed our model for how we're ordering content, for how we're rolling out content, for how we're working with our production partners, and how we're trying to get things to kids.

This has nothing to do with what we were just talking about. But it kind of goes back to the original question, which is, how children's entertainment has changed over the decades. I remember, I don't know, 10 years ago or so, I picked up a DVD of the first season of Sesame Street.

And there was a disclaimer that stated, don't let your kids watch this because it's not appropriate. Most people would not think of there being that kind of evolution on Sesame Street.

Have you experienced that with other older programming, where you realize a particular show was fine, but it’s not where kids are at right now?

Yeah. I'm so glad you said this because this is something that I've heard a lot over the last year and even before that was, why do you have to make new content for kids? Won't they just watch the same thing over and over again?

There was the whole tipping point idea that kids will just watch the same episode over and over again. That's true for really young kids. That's not true for our whole audience.

But kids still are discerning viewers. They still recognize what's old and what's kind of timeless versus what's really fresh right now. And so, yes, you do see a lot of shifts.

I mean, we've got shows like Arthur that have been able to span 25 years because they kind of capture the zeitgeist of fourth grade and third grade in a way that nothing else does. Not every episode, you know, so you have to kind of watch that. But we also need to make sure we're telling stories that are fresh and timely.

Right now, parents are so freaked out about AI and what's happening in the world around kids, and they don't know how to navigate it. That's something we can teach really well through storytelling, you know. So we have episodes now where a kid in Lyla In The Loop is making an art project and gets help from a computer and accidentally turns in the computer's one instead of her own.

Is it her work or is it the computer's work? How do you have that conversation with your teacher? How do you disclose what you did?

These are real-life things that kids need to be grappling with. So it continues to be important to make new content.

One of the things I admire about PBS Kids is that from the outset, there has been a determination to do the programming you think is best for the kids instead of trying to please outside forces. Unlike a lot of places, PBS Kids programming is still very diverse.

For instance, Carl The Collector is a great series. When it launched, I interviewed the showrunner and one of the writers who's on the spectrum. We went through the whole thing. I have a 21-year-old on the spectrum, and one of the things I liked about the show was this idea of showing it in a very nuanced way. Of showing characters who aren’t stereotypes, but complicated kids with different perspectives.

We have this theory that we talk about a lot that comes from child development and that is windows and mirrors. We know from studies of psychology, it's really well documented, that if a kid sees a positive portrayal of a kid who looks like them on television, their success in school is going to be greater, and often their long-term success is going to be greater. I mean, media has an impact.

And so we think about, okay, how do we make sure that as many kids as possible in the U.S. see kids who are like them? And it's not always one-to-one. One of my favorite stories is when we launched Molly of Denali, which is set in Alaska.

It seems very specific. It's Alaska native, you know. There was this question, certainly with international broadcasters, who thought this isn't going to be relatable to other kids.

I got a call from the GM of a station in Arkansas who said, I'm hearing from viewers that this is the first show that looks like their lives because it's so rural. Because there's a school that has multiple grades, like meeting together, because there aren't enough kids for a fourth-grade class. And of course that didn't represent all of Arkansas, but it was representing some kids that aren't used to seeing their lifestyle on television.

So it wasn't even the character; it was the world that mattered. So the mirror, that's one thing, but then the other one is the window. We offer an opportunity to show kids what other kids' lives are like, or what other places are like, or what scientific concepts that they've never seen are like.

And that's where we really can inspire this passion for learning, you know. So many kids will go to their parents at the dinner table and rattle off animal facts, and the parents will be like, I had no idea how they learned this, and then I learned it was on Wild Kratts. We're giving them a window into something that they might actually be really passionate and excited about, and want to pursue that learning away from the screen.

And that's really important. That's why we're here.

Wild Kratts is funny because, at least from my perspective, they're really well-known, and then they get to a certain age, and it's like, “Oh, it's going to be animated because that's more relatable to someone who's a kid, as opposed to a couple of older guys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it was an interesting kind of shift.

It seems like it worked well.

You know, the way they pitched it to us, actually, was, we've done all of these animal shows. We've done Kratts’ Creatures, we've done Zoboomafoo, and we've shown all kinds of animal things, but we've only shown animals that we could get close enough to. And there's so much we know about animals that you can't get close enough to film.

And animation would allow us to show the things that we can't actually show in the same way. Their age might have been part of it. I think they're ready to not be traveling all the time.

I thought it was a great way to do it.

It was such a great shift. And they still have the live action pieces, top and tail. They still go on live tours.

They sell out theaters throughout the country because kids want to meet them. I met them at the one in D.C., and it was like a meet-and-greet. The number of kids who gave them their drawings of animals, who wanted to tell them about their pets, and now the number of 20-somethings who want to talk about the degree they got in biology, or their love of animals, or how they volunteered in an animal shelter.

I mean, it was just really moving. Yeah, it's very cool.

You mentioned a station in Arkansas. And I'm wondering how that dynamic works between the stations and the network. Obviously PBS Kids programming is important to the individual stations, but that input from individual stations, I suspect, is also important to the success of PBS Kids. Talk a little bit about that dynamic because it's a unique relationship.

It is. It's true. For instance, we have a station advisory and leadership committee.

It's an advisory committee where we often talk about what's coming next and what we're looking for, and then we also hear from them. They were instrumental in helping us focus after the defunding because we said, we have always talked about curriculum as being a whole child. We want to do STEM.

We want to do art. We want to do music. We want to do literacy.

We want to do math. We want to do it all. And we need to focus now.

And so we talk to stations who are often really connected to community partners and to schools and asked. “What's the number one thing you're hearing from parents right now?” And it was school readiness, especially coming out of the pandemic.

How do we make sure kids are ready to go to school? Parents are nervous about it. Teachers are nervous about it.

Big components of that are math and literacy, their skill base, but they're also the things you learn in Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. It's how to be a good friend, how to share, how to put your lunchbox away in a cubby, how to line up, all that kind of stuff. And we can do that really well.

So stations helped us focus. And, you know, when we are launching something that is coming from a creator in a different part of the country, that's so much fun. Like the creator of Rosie's Rules lives in Houston and set the show in South Texas.

And so the Texas stations were all in on that. The creators of Phoebe and Jay are in L.A. And they fashioned their show after the old L.A. hotels that they refurbished to be affordable housing. And that meant PBS SoCal decided, “We're going to go do events in low-income communities and libraries and showcase where these kids live, that they live in an apartment, that this is relatable.”

So it's an opportunity, too, for stations to make something feel even more local by making that connection.

You've worked at PBS for so long…

It's never gotten boring.

And I suspect that like any job, you're in the middle of it, and it's just a fire hose, and you're not really thinking about anything except this is what I'm doing right now. But what's it like when you get to a point in your career and you realize, these people have grown up on stuff that I did? It didn't seem that important at the time. But now I see the impact it had on people.

I think about this all the time. My whole career until four years ago was just digital. Before I stepped into this role.

And so I was always thinking about what was the next platform. Where else do we need to explore? What else do we need to look at?

Should we do streaming or not? I'm so proud. I mean, that streaming player, we had a grant from CPB.

None of us thought that preschool kids would watch a full-length episode in streaming. But we wanted to put it out there and test it and kind of see. We had predicted that we would get 5 million streams in that first month. And we got 66 million streams in that first month.

So there are things like that where I can see we met a moment when no other broadcaster was doing this.

So I can see that. And then when it comes to viewers themselves, I was at South by Southwest doing a gaming panel. And someone stood up and asked a question.

And then after she finished the question, she said, “And by the way, I got into making games because of the Fetch Roller Coaster game,” which is a game I worked on. It was just the wildest idea that something that we built inspired this kid to go into game development. And this person is now in their 20s doing this.

You don't think of your legacy and the impact you have on other people.

But it happens.

And really, that's a perspective for all PBS kids: this idea of providing a legacy that you're positively changing people's lives, even if they don't realize it at the time.

There's this proliferation of content. It's so crazy. And I keep thinking about the early days, when I started.

If you wanted to get a show on television, you had to come up with an idea that you sold to a producer or you pitched to a producer. You had to get their buy-in. You had to get the funding to get it made.

You had to get a green light from a broadcaster. And then you had to meet the FCC guidelines. You had to meet the FTC guidelines with all that stuff.

And today, you've got this moment where anyone can create anything for kids. It's a firehose of content. And a lot of it is AI slop.

A lot of it is really not good for them and harmful in some ways. And it just comes back to me over and over again how important it is to have something like PBS Kids. Something that is really thinking about the well-being of a child, putting them at the center, being methodical and thoughtful about it.

As I said earlier, over this last year, we've had such an outpouring. There are so many parents saying that's what we need for our kids. So I just think it's more important than ever.

And also having responsibility of not screwing up the brand because, really, the brand is everything.

Right. So you're not going to see us chase trends. But instead, look at the next things and think, how would you do that in a PBS way?

What's the right way for PBS to approach this?