Association of Music Personnel in Public Radio 
Fall 2002

    Kids. What can you do with ‘em?
      No, this is not a frustrated mother question. It’s a radio question. Is it possible for radio stations to reach kids without chasing away adult listeners? Is instructional radio dead? Should public radio even bother trying? Don’t children get enough attention from commercial radio and TV? If Arbitron doesn’t measure below 12 years old, does that mean a quarter of the population doesn’t matter? 
      I doubt anyone would argue with a program director who considers educational programs a turnoff for kids and “kiddie” programs a turnoff for adults. Really horrible programming in the past has justifiably prejudiced a whole generation of program directors. Calligraphy on the radio is one of my favorites. So is the science show that says, “now look at your sheets and choose a, b, or c” and the music show that encourages students to count to four, followed by four beats of dead air.
      Some of us still believe, however, that public radio is the antidote to commercialism. It can be entertaining and educational without being horrible. Public radio is traditionally aimed at college-educated adults. How about the smart little people who are going to become college-educated adults? Maybe some other kinds of people will even listen in, if the programming is interesting enough. Do we have an obligation to serve the younger people of the community?
      Kathy O’Connell, veteran children’s radio programmer, is a champion of kid radio. “I wish there were a lot more of it,” she says. “To create good kid radio, you take the same approach you would take to creating radio for adults.” O’Connell is approaching her twentieth year of programming Kids Corner at WXPN in Philadelphia. “People used to say you couldn’t get kids to read,” says O’Connell, “but Harry Potter proved that wrong.” 
      That is certainly true in my family. Three generations of us fight over the Harry Potter books and stay up till all hours reading them. What is the magic formula that author J. K. Rowling uses to obliterate generational lines and appeal to adults as well as to children? Which program director would turn down a hit like Harry Potter, just because it’s aimed at kids?
      If we could bottle that formula for radio, kid radio would no longer be anathema. “You can shoot over a kid’s head, but don’t shoot under,” advises O’Connell. The kiss of death is sugary, condescending, cutesy-pie kid’s programming. O’Connell’s rule of thumb is to “make it funny.” Humor crosses all generations. I would add: have some interesting content. Duh. How many kid show hosts come in, take calls, play kiddie songs, and go home? Maybe for kids a little more preparation would make the shows really interesting.
      I produce a children’s program about world and classical music called “Boombox Classroom.” On our pair of shows about Space Music an astronaut describes his three shuttle missions. A meteoriticist (go on, admit it. You’ve never even heard the word meteoriticist before) talks about the planets, a storyteller from Sweden tells a story from the Finnish epic Kalevala about the sun and the moon, accompanied by a kantele, and a physicist explains why you can’t have a marching band on the moon (sound has no way to travel in space).
      African drumming, a visit backstage at the Santa Fe Opera, Mongolian throat-singing, cutting up with fiddler Mark O’Connor, tap-dancing in Chicago and clogging in the Appalachians, a Tarahumara Indian in Mexico’s Copper Canyon playing a homemade violin, an Aztec flute that shoots flames when you blow it, Ecuadorian panpipes that are bigger than the kids, a Ghanaian master drummer who got scared and ran away when a bunch of white folks took off their clothes and danced naked (he said, “and they think Africans are always naked”)—who wouldn’t be interested in those? That is a miniscule snapshot of the content on “Boombox Classroom.” The criterion? If it is interesting to adults it will be interesting to kids.

What’s Out There?

      The Children’s Radio Web lists 85 stations that had some form of children’s programming in 2001. I wonder how many of them are produced by top-notch radio professionals or involve professional educators. In surveying some of those stations for this article, I noticed many of the stations do not even mention their children’s programming on their websites.
      Naomi Lewin at WGUC in Cincinnati produces a long-running children’s program about classical music. It is mostly about composers and is educational in small bites. It is serious, not silly and has written materials with it. David Ford and Russell Sarre at KMFA in Austin produce two lighter kids’ shows about music that use a lot of humor. 
      “From the Top” by PRI, with host Christopher O’Riley, has taken stations by storm. In a recent count it was airing on 200 stations. It features some fabulous young people in a kind of talent-show format, performing mostly classical music; I have heard that ratings indicate it is adults who listen to it, not kids. Time will tell.
      KFUO in St. Louis has a kid show hosted by Jim Althoff. “The music is described by Jim in a non-technical way, with no ‘cutesy’ helper characters—the focus is on the music itself,” says their website. The show itself has no characters, but they introduce the program on the website by saying it is music from the cartoons.
       There are a lot more kid programs out there. Most of them are not syndicated. Most of them I believe are way too young and condescending. There is nothing kids can’t do if you challenge them enough.

Why bother?

      In Albuquerque we have one music teacher for every 2,000 students. As a long-time classical music announcer and professional music educator, I thought I could fix that. The commercial station where I worked had a kid’s show that was not curriculum-based. After offering them an upgraded show for four years and being turned down repeatedly, I decided getting music to kids was more important than one man’s opinion, so I offered it to the public station. It cost me my job.
      The public station then turned down several iterations of the pilot that they thought would chase away adult listeners. Their reasons were excellent and the program has evolved. Originally I agreed with KFUO that “cutesy” helper characters were too childish, but we started using one “music monster” who could ask questions adults would be embarrassed to ask and kids wouldn’t know to ask. In classroom visits, the first thing kids want to know about always is “Jollip.” Jollip is childish in the way The Simpsons or Harry Potter are childish.
      We air the programs during the day and promote them to teachers. Last year 271 classrooms used the programs in Albuquerque, and we hope to double that this year. There’s nothing like a captive audience! Our age-appropriate worksheets are on the web along with teachers’ materials and playlists for stations. We send the programs free on CD to any stations that want them. (Currently 15 stations in 12 states carry the shows.)
      “Boombox Classroom” is just one way to approach children’s programming. It is designed specifically to fill a gap in arts instruction in communities where music has been cut from the elementary schools. Some very convincing recent research on the national level shows that children who have music instruction improve their cognitive skills in all subjects.
      But communities that don’t have a need for elementary music instruction still have good reasons to provide children’s radio programming. Radio stimulates the imagination much more than TV does (though not as much as reading does). Anything we can do to get kids away from the TV is a good thing.
      TV discovered long ago that parents have deep pockets. It is not a bad thing for radio stations to try to attract new members through their kids. More importantly, “parents can feel safe that their kids are listening to public radio,” says Kathy O’Connell. The sex and violence that bombards them on television is not generally a programming goal of children’s shows on public radio.
      New audience and underserved audience are also important targets for public stations. Kids are both. 
      Professional educators know that listening is the single most important skill kids need for learning to read. What better place to learn to listen than public radio?
      I vote yes for (good) kid’s radio. Maybe it is time for serious discussion on the subject. 

Marty Ronish is an independent producer of educational programs about classical and world music for adults and children. Her flagship program is “Boombox Classroom.” Information on the website: www.sweetbirdclassics.org, or email: mronish@flash.net.