Oklahoma Educational Television Authority
The Oklahoma Educational Television Authority is a network of PBS member television stations serving the U.S. state of Oklahoma. The authority operates as a statutory corporation that holds the licenses for all of the PBS stations operating in the state; it is managed by an independent board of gubernatorial appointees, and university and education officials, which is linked to the executive branch of the Oklahoma state government through the Secretary of Education.
In addition to offering programs supplied by PBS and acquired from various independent distributors, the network produces news, public affairs, cultural, and documentary programming; the OETA also distributes online education programs for classroom use and teacher professional development, and maintains the state's Warning, Alert and Response Network infrastructure to disseminate emergency alerts to Oklahoma residents. The broadcast signals of the four full-power and fifteen translator stations comprising the network cover almost all of the state, as well as fringe areas of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas near the Oklahoma state line. It and KRSU-TV, an independent public station owned by Rogers State University in Claremore, are Oklahoma's only public television stations.
OETA's main offices, production facilities, and the channel 13 transmitter are located at the Robert L. Allen Telecommunications Center at the north intersection of Kelley Avenue and Britton Road in northeastern Oklahoma City, adjacent to the former studios of KWTV-DT and KSBI. In Tulsa, OETA uses studios on the campus of Oklahoma State University's extension center on North Greenwood Avenue on the city's northeast side.
History
Incorporation and development
OETA traces its history to November 19, 1951, when a state educational television development conference was held to direct the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education to file applications with the Federal Communications Commission to reserve certain broadcast television frequencies in selected cities throughout Oklahoma for non-commercial educational stations. In a unanimous vote, the Oklahoma Legislature subsequently approved House Concurrent Resolution #5, which urged the FCC to reserve broadcast television frequencies for non-commercial use. On May 18, 1953, Oklahoma became the first state that passed legislation to develop a statewide educational television service, when the legislature passed House Bill #1033, creating the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority as an independent statutory corporation. The bill—which was co-sponsored by State Rep. W. H. Langley and State Sen. J. Byron Dacus, and was signed by Governor Johnston Murray—charged the organization with providing educational television programming to Oklahomans on a coordinated statewide basis, to be made possible with cooperation from the state's educational, government and cultural agencies, under the supervision and direction of the statute authority.After appointing its members, in August 1953, the OETA Board of Directors held its first meeting and began the process of forming a statewide public television network. On December 2, 1953, the FCC granted a construction permit to build a television station on VHF channel 13 in Oklahoma City; seven months later, on July 21, 1954, it would grant OETA a second permit to build a non-commercial station on VHF channel 11 in Tulsa. To help finance the venture, the OETA was authorized to issue revenue bonds redeemable with financial funding accumulated in the public building fund. It would take three years for OETA to sign on its first station, as the legislature failed to appropriate operational funding to the statute corporation, which it was required to allocate under mandate of the authority charter; legislators believed that donations from private entities and the public would be able to cover the operating expenses for the upstart stations.
After securing a broadcast license from the FCC, $540,000 in legislative appropriations, and private funding from various special interest groups, KETA in Oklahoma City—which would become the network's flagship—was finally able to sign on the air over channel 13 on April 13, 1956; it was the first educational television station to sign on in Oklahoma, the second in the Southwestern United States and the 20th non-commercial television station to sign on within the United States. Channel 13 originally operated from studio facilities located on the campus of the University of Oklahoma in Norman; its transmitter antenna was based in northeast Oklahoma City near the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Kelley Avenue, per an agreement with the Oklahoma Television Corporation that granted the OETA free use of the transmission tower and adjacent land near the studio building of KWTV.
KETA—as well as the full-power repeaters it would sign on in later years—originally served as a member station of the National Educational Television and Radio Center, which evolved into National Educational Television in 1963. During its first fourteen years of operation, KETA – and later, KOED – maintained a 20-hour weekly schedule of instruction programming, broadcasting only on Monday through Friday afternoons from August through May; much of the station's programming in its early years consisted of video telecourse lectures televised in cooperation with the Oklahoma State Department of Education, which offered course subjects attributable for college credit. Programming from NET aired on KETA year-round during prime time for 2½ hours each Monday through Friday.
In June 1956, ABC elected to use KETA to telecast the network's coverage of the 1956 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and Presidential election results. In seeking a waiver of FCC rules requiring advertisements to be deleted when an educational television outlet carries a sponsored program, ABC noted that it was denied "effective competitive access" in Oklahoma City, due to the fact that KWTV and NBC affiliate WKY-TV were the only stations operating in the market at that time and already had primary network allegiances. By early July, the OETA had withdrawn KETA from the waiver petition, resulting in the FCC choosing unanimously to refuse to "entertain" an ABC-only request to waive the rules.
Expansion into a statewide network
Over the course of nineteen years, the authority gradually evolved into a statewide public television network. KOED-TV in Tulsa, which was founded through a legislative appropriation granted to the authority, became the first of KETA's three satellite stations to go on the air, on January 12, 1959. The launch of the state's second educational television station made Oklahoma only the second U.S. state to have an operational educational television network after Alabama Educational Television began expanding into a statewide network in April 1955. The authority petitioned to move KOED's allocation to that reserved by local commercial station KJRH-TV in July 1981, but was ultimately denied permission to take over the frequency. In 1970, KETA and KOED became member stations of the Public Broadcasting Service, which was launched as an independent entity to supersede and assume many of the functions of the predecessor NET network.OETA experienced significant growth under the stewardship of Bob Allen, a former director of communications at the Oklahoma State Department of Education, who was appointed as the authority's executive director in June 1972 and remained in that position until his retirement in December 1998. Allen—who would also serve on the Board of Directors of PBS and other national public television organizations during his tenure at the member network—initiated many efforts to help grow OETA into his vision as a network that would distribute educational and cultural programs throughout Oklahoma's 77 counties.) and Bill Thrash, who was appointed as OETA's station manager and program director after having worked at KTVY's programming and managerial departments since the 1970s, In 1973, OETA expanded its broadcast schedule to 49 hours per week ; that year, the network expanded its weekday lineup into the late-evening hours, and began to offer an expanded programming schedule on Saturdays, in addition to an existing Sunday lineup that expanded from evenings only to the daytime hours around that time. OETA moved its main Oklahoma City operations in 1974, when it opened a new studio and office facility next to KETA's Kelley Avenue transmitter site, which was constructed through funds appropriated by the legislature and allowed the member network to begin producing locally originated programming. To accrue additional donations to fund programming and operational expenditures, OETA inaugurated its annual "Festival" pledge drive in 1975; the first edition of the two-week event—which is held each March, except in 2019, during the suspension of pledge collections in the midst of its dispute with the OETA Foundation—saw OETA raise more than $125,000 in public and private donations to help with programming dues and acquisitions. In 1976, OETA purchased a mobile broadcasting unit for the production of programs in the field, which allowed it to conduct remote broadcasts at various locations throughout Oklahoma. The following year, the state legislature's OETA appropriation funding for 1977, granted the authority funds to purchase an extensive curriculum of instructional telecourse programs for broadcast on the network to schools across Oklahoma.
On December 1, 1977, the network launched its third station, KOET in Eufaula, as a satellite of KOED-TV to serve most of east-central Oklahoma. The sign-on of KOET—which the FCC had reserved its would-be channel 3 allocation for noncommercial use on August 20, 1975, and granted it to petitioner OETA on December 28, 1976—was made possible in part by a 1966 federal grant to the authority that was intended to fund the expansion of the state network and to allow it to purchase color broadcasting equipment. In 1978, OETA produced the first program to be syndicated nationally by the member network to other public television stations, when it broadcast the U.S. Open Table Tennis Championships; that year also saw the premiere of OETA's first regionally syndicated series, The Other School System, a 13-part program co-hosted by Art Linkletter and former Miss America Jane Jayroe.
OETA launched its fourth and final full-power station on August 6, 1978, when KWET in Cheyenne signed on as a satellite of KETA, serving west-central and portions of northwestern and southwestern Oklahoma, and the far eastern Texas Panhandle. OETA also began building a network of low-power UHF translators to service parts of the state that were unable to receive the four full-power VHF stations. That same year, the network signed repeaters in Hugo and in Idabel to relay KOET.
In 1979, under the guidance of Governor George Nigh, OETA activated four additional translators in Beaver, Boise City, Buffalo and Guymon to relay KWET and KETA's programming to the Oklahoma Panhandle and portions of northwestern Oklahoma. By the time the translator network was completed in 1981, with the sign-on of six repeaters in Alva, Ardmore, Duncan, Frederick, Lawton and Ponca City, OETA extended its coverage to nearly the entire state., OETA's full-power stations make up the vast majority of its overall coverage, reaching roughly 80 percent of Oklahoma's geographic population. In 1981, OETA opened a satellite facility in east Tulsa on North Sheridan Road and East Independence Street to serve as a secondary production facility and to house the operations of KOED and its relays; the first television program to be produced out of the new Tulsa facility, Arts Chronicle, made its debut on the network the following year. 1981 also saw OETA enter into an agreement to syndicate Creative Crafts, an arts and crafts program that had been produced by KTVY in Oklahoma City since 1950, on the network's stations on a 13-week trial basis.
On April 2, 1983, straight-line wind gusts between at the upper sections of KETA's broadcast tower tore loose brackets that held in place a long, thick copper transmission cable that linked to the station's transmitter dish, ripping the cable from the tower and causing an electrical short in the transmitter. Over-the-air service to KETA and its translators in north-central and southern Oklahoma was restored later that week, after KWTV allowed its fellow tower tenant to use their backup cable until repairs could be conducted. However, to facilitate upgrades to its transmission system that would begin on August 15, KWTV management notified Governor Nigh that it needed to use the cable to replace clamps attached to channel 9's main cable line, a situation that would have resulted in OETA having to suspend programming for two weeks. After the Oklahoma State Contingency Review Board rejected the authority's request for emergency funds for the transmission cable replacement, on July 21, Allen initiated his own fundraising effort: it included distributing funding solicitation mailers that were delivered to 34,000 private and public donors who contributed to the "Festival '83" pledge drive that March, and a stunt conducted by Allen himself, in which he climbed onto the tower to seek donations from the public. The effort raised $248,000 in donations. The failure to obtain legislature approval to be granted funding for the repairs came as OETA received a 24.8 percent reduction in state funding in its 1983 funding appropriation, stemming from a decline in state revenue that necessitated budget cuts that adversely affected several other state agencies; the cuts led to OETA implementing a two-day furlough of its entire employee base that December. Also that year, the authority established the OETA Foundation, becoming one of the first public television stations in the nation to adopt an endowment model for private donations; the foundation's programming endowment plan was created to solicit and receive permanent endowment donations to help support Oklahoma's public television system.
To help improve OETA's standing in the state, Allen initiated several ambitious programming efforts. In 1987, the authority's production unit, The Oklahoma Network, acquired the national syndication rights to The Lawrence Welk Show, producing compilation episodes combining excerpts from the classic variety series with original hosted wraparound segments; OETA subsequently began distributing the program to other PBS member stations throughout the United States. Then in 1989, the network premiered Oklahoma Passage, a five-part miniseries told in the form of a first-person story illustrating the first 150 years of Oklahoma's history from the perspective of a Georgia family who moved to the Indian Territory in the 1840s. In 1990, OETA premiered Wordscape, a 16-part nationally syndicated instructional series for children in Grades 4 through 6, providing grammar instruction through two to five word cells per 15-minute episode, which were tied to a common theme; the Heartland Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded the program a 1991 Heartland Emmy Award for Outstanding Youth/Children's Program.