TV EXTENDS BID TO CURB ILLITERACY

Capital Cities/ABC joined with public television on Monday to announce that they are extending their joint public-service campaign to combat illiteracy across the nation through the 1987-88 broadcast season.

Top officials for the commercial television network and representatives of the noncommercial Public Broadcasting Service said their new efforts on behalf of Project Literacy U.S. (PLUS) will include TV specials, a made-for-TV movie and more scripts for prime-time series that include plots focusing on illiteracy problems.

At a news conference, James E. Duffy, president of the office of communications for Capital Cities/ABC Inc., called the efforts by ABC and public broadcasters an “unprecedented alliance that has worked well on every dimension.”

Duffy called illiteracy America’s “hidden problem,” and said that as a result of the Project Literacy campaign, “hundreds of thousands of people have contacted organizations for help.”

“This is a wonderful moment for America,” said Barbara Bush, an active supporter of efforts to reduce illiteracy and the wife of Vice President George Bush.

She called the public-service campaign “one of the most important happenings in a movement that is full of good news.”

Lloyd Kaiser, president of Metropolitan Pittsburgh Public Broadcasting Inc., the parent firm of public-TV station WQED in Pittsburgh, said that since Project Literacy was launched in December, 1985, it has been formally endorsed by 110 national groups and has helped to spur the development of more than 300 community task forces across the country.

WQED has been leading the PBS efforts in this area with funding from the Corp. for Public Broadcasting. It produced several programs about the illiteracy problem last fall and will be making others with the same intention of motivating people to get help.

“We’re going to explain how tough it is and will be to function in our society without basic reading and writing skills, how extremely important being literate is in an information- and technology-based society,” Kaiser said.

According to statistics released by Project Literacy, about 23 million Americans are functionally illiterate, with basic skills at the fourth-grade level or below, while another 35 million people are semi-illiterate, with skills below the eighth-grade level.

Moreover, 13% of America’s work force is said to be illiterate, while more than 50% of the nation’s workers have problems with grammar, spelling, punctuation and mathematics. Adult illiteracy reportedly costs society an estimated $225 billion a year in lost industrial productivity, unrealized tax revenues, welfare, crime, poverty and related social ills.

At the news conference, Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas said that combatting illiteracy is one of the most important things that the nation’s governors can do. “We have got to pay the price of time to deal with this issue,” he said.

Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode, an active supporter of urban programs to fight illiteracy, said that with efforts like Project Literacy, “we can turn people’s lives around.”

As for ABC’s plans, Duffy said the network will air an “Afterschool Special” on April 29 featuring the Harlem Globetrotters, and will include illiteracy in the plot of the May 2 episode of the TV series “Starman.” A TV movie planned for September will concern a manufacturing executive whose promotion to a new job exposes his inability to read or write adequately.

ABC also will air a live three-hour special on July 4 from St. Louis that will carry performances from a special concert being held there to benefit national nonprofit groups working to combat illiteracy.

To date, more than 15 major music performers have signed up to help launch a new organization called Artists for Literacy, according to Dr. Michael Bell, executive director of the ColorSounds Foundation. The musicians will make personal appearances, tape public-service announcements for Project Literacy or donate a share of the proceeds from their concerts to the literacy movement.

Each month, ABC plans to run a public service announcement featuring an individual who has mada efforts to overcome illiteracy. The one that began airing on the network Monday features Estel Sizemore, 55, a truck driver from Cincinnati, Ohio, who could only sign his name until he started to learn to read six years ago.

In it, Sizemore talks about how he had to make excuses to his children when they asked him to read to them. At the end of the spot, he speaks softly of his 7-month-old great-granddaughter, Ashley, and how he hopes to read to her.

ABC brought Sizemore, now retired with a disability, to the news conference. “I can read up to the fourth- or fifth-grade level now,” he said proudly in an interview.

“Before I only saw things happen. I never got to read about them,” he said. “The greatest feeling in the world is to be able to pick up a newspaper and read it.”