It’s a Dreary Day in the Neighborhood
PBS Kids has taken a major hit. In early January, one of its key partners, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, ended its operations. Doomed after Congress passed the Rescissions Act of 2025, the CPB saw its $1 billion in federal funding eliminated. Those monies had been distributed to hundreds of NPR and PBS stations across the country. President Trump promised to defund public media and he delivered, despite the fact that a majority of Americans opposed eliminating those dollars: Two-thirds see public media as a trusted and reliable outlet for quality educational children’s programs.
In addition to these CPB cuts, last year the Department of Education also announced that it was terminating the Ready To Learn grant, a five-year block grant program that provided PBS with over $100 million during its 2020–2025 cycle. Since 2006, Ready To Learn grants had provided PBS and PBS Kids with funding to produce programming, offer learning materials to families, and conduct research into the effectiveness of PBS’s educational content.
Though preschool enrollment has increased nationwide, less than half of preschool-age children are enrolled in school. The quality of education and enrollment in pre-K programs varies greatly by state, leaving some children with unequal access to early education. With its unique brand of free and accessible content, PBS Kids has helped to bridge the educational gap for families who may not be able to afford preschool—if it’s offered—or who live in areas with limited funding for educational materials. Accessibility has been a top priority for PBS, but without federal funding, the network has had to pause many of the programs in development.
Since last summer, PBS Kids has laid off 30 percent of its staff, with more cuts expected this year. PBS Kids has removed dozens of educational games from its website and lost the entire team of researchers that evaluated how well they served children’s educational needs. “There was not a function within PBS Kids that wasn’t affected,” says Sara DeWitt, senior vice president and general manager of PBS Kids. PBS normally releases one or two new children’s series every year, but the pipeline for developing new shows has been cut in half due to the staffing cuts. Children and parents can watch all PBS Kids shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, WordGirl, or Curious George online, but creating new content is critical.
One of the issues that PBS Kids faces is that viewers may assume their programs have disappeared along with the CPB. Despite staff cuts, most of their programing is still available. “There are some shows that remain kind of timely and relevant, even if they are older,” DeWitt told the Prospect, “but we also need to make sure that we’re creating content for kids that is really relevant to them today, in today’s world—in a moment where AI technology is exploding around them and they’re going to have to navigate it, and in a time when the ways that subjects are being taught is changing in schools.”
There have been cutbacks in other areas. The ASL versions of completed episodes of certain programs will still be available, but new ones will be slow to come out, if at all. Additionally, PBS Kids has had to pause some ASL research, such as finding ways to lower the background music of episodes for children with sensory issues, due to the cuts. The work on ensuring that PBS content works well on older technology is also at risk, raising concerns that some low-income families and people who access PBS at public libraries may have trouble viewing certain games and programs.
Shelley Pasnik, a principal investigator for Ready To Learn Research and Evaluation, a project of the Education Development Center, a global research organization, describes the cuts as a “loss to the entire ecosystem of children’s media production.” Many children’s media creators outside of PBS Kids had used the Ready To Learn grant-funded research as a model for educational content. “It’s not simply the specific programs that won’t get funding,” Pasnik says. “It’s the overall caliber of production and commitment to learning that will suffer.”
PBS Kids premiered Phoebe & Jay, its final Ready To Learn–funded series, this month. The program follows the twins’ adventures and aims to build the literacy skills of pre-kindergarten children. DeWitt says that since the funding cuts, PBS Kids’ viewership across all platforms “has remained steady” with about 15.5 million monthly digital visitors.
“We know that we already were kind of hard to find in this explosion of media,” DeWitt says, “and now we have an even bigger hurdle to make sure that parents know that we are still here, that we’re still free, that we are accessible, and that we continue to provide an educational service for them.”
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