$500,000 GRANT RECEIVED : KCET PROPOSES SERIES ON ILLITERACY

KCET Channel 28 has received a $500,000 grant from the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation of Newport Beach to fund the development of a major series designed to combat the nation’s growing adult illiteracy problem, the public TV station said Monday.

The money will help pay for the research for the projected 26-part series and for the production of a pilot episode, a spokeswoman for KCET said. The station is seeking several million dollars in additional funding to cover the production of the other 25 half-hour episodes and support material to enhance their educational impact.

Tentatively titled “The American Ticket,” the magazine-format series would endeavor to teach the English language skills necessary to function adequately in U. S. society. It would be geared to people over the age of 15 who are functionally illiterate--both native-born Americans who never acquired the skills in school and those immigrants and refugees who are learning English as a second language.

The U. S. Department of Education has estimated that there are 27 million adults in the United States who are functionally illiterate and another 45 million who are marginally literate, meaning they have minimal reading abilities but not enough to understand a newspaper or the directions on a medicine bottle.

In a statement released by KCET, the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation said that it is “committed to the goals of eliminating adult illiteracy on a national level and is confident that ‘The American Ticket’ is a valuable step in this direction.”

Production on the pilot is scheduled for the spring of 1986, KCET said, meaning that the series itself probably wouldn’t be ready for broadcast until 1987.

“The American Ticket” is not the only public TV program in the works addressed to the illiteracy problem. Station WQED-TV in Pittsburgh is developing a special for the Public Broadcasting Service that would seek to generate awareness of the problem and to stimulate community involvement in finding solutions, as happened last year with WQED’s “The Chemical People,” which dealt with teen-age drug and alcohol abuse.

If sufficient funding is lined up, the program will air early next year.