Broward schools’ TV station could get revamp

BECON may start selling air time, distance learning videos

Broward schools’ outdated and money-losing television station could be in for an overhaul.

Broward Education Communications Network, better known as BECON, may start selling air time on its TV station or distancelearning videos it produces locally. It may even start a local newscast that focuses on news happening in Broward schools, said Kathy Koch, chief communications officer for Broward schools, who oversees the station.

What it’s doing now — mainly airing School Board meetings and educational and family-friendly programming — isn’t enough, an outside audit concluded. The report, produced for the district by the Carr, Riggs & Ingram accounting firm, said BECON needs to update its equipment and job descriptions and find new revenues to pay for its $4.8 million-a-year budget.

“BECON is an under-utilized asset we have here in the district,” Koch told the School Board on Wednesday. “We have assets but some of them are old and some of the job descriptions are old. We need to determine how to turn BECON into a much bigger asset and bigger communication tool.”

She said Broward was one of only seven school districts that owns a TV station.

A proposal for how to improve BECON is expected to go before the School Board in January.

BECON employs about 65 people. But many job descriptions “require skills in obsolete system or omit skills necessary for current operations,” the audit said.

Examples include clerical positions that require short hand or typewriters, and technical and production jobs that require use of archaic media equipment, such as “broadcast recorders” and make no reference to digital video, social media or Internet content.

The station runs $21 million worth of equipment, but most of it is 10 to 20 years old, and the district has allocated little money to replace failing equipment.

Although School Board members have dreamed for years of making BECON a money-generating operation, the audit showed

fundraising has been weak, and the district has only one major private revenue source, $2.4 million a year from leasing a broadband service license to Sprint.

District officials have inquired about BECON affiliating with a PBS channel but that option isn’t available because the Miami-Broward market already has two PBS stations.

At a recent meeting of the district’s Audit Committee, Koch said her vision of BECON included creating a newsroom to cover school news that may not get picked up by local media.

“The first thing is to have a TV station that is responsive to the community. The superintendent would have a weekly show,” on the progress of school-renovation projects and other issues, Koch told the Audit Committee last month. “At the end of the day, you could come home and after your local news, you can turn on and see what’s happening in the school district,.”

Koch told the committee that “TV is what people are looking at. It’s how we get our news. The daily newspaper is low subscription. We’re all looking at TV.”

But her focus on traditional TV left some Audit Committee members questioning whether the district was really ready to take BECON into the 21st century.

“My kids are 12 and 14, and we do a lot of streaming," Audit Committee member Nathalie Lynch Walsh said. "I hear a lot about a TV station. That’s a whole other level of concern I didn’t have when we started.”

BECON’s history dates to 1966 when it was formed to produce educational videos for the district. In 2000, the School Board purchased a community broadcast channel, now WBEC-TV Ch. 63, which also appears on cable and satellite systems.