ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : COMMENTARY ON PUBLIC TELEVISION : Continued Federal Support of KCET Benefits Community : Local PBS station educates and entertains--especially children--through programs both on and off the air.

A recent episode of the television sitcom “Roseanne” dealt with the pregnant mother’s desire to improve the quality of her life for the benefit of her unborn child. To accomplish this goal, Roseanne prohibits her family from watching any television except the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). While the episode playfully parodies some PBS programs, Roseanne’s rationale was quite understandable. Public television does enrich and educate as well as entertain, especially America’s children.

A growing concern of many parents is the number of hours their children spend in front of the television set. Recent studies show that the average number exceeds three hours per day. Realizing the impact that television can have on children and their desire to watch so much of it, public television has been providing an alternative to commercial children’s television for more than 25 years. And yet this alternative is currently in serious jeopardy from the proposed federal budget cuts.

Unlike commercial television, PBS produces and airs programs specifically aimed at stimulating the minds and enhancing the emotional development of young children, to facilitate creative thinking, instill strong social values and promote healthy self-esteem. Public television has intermixed learning with fun and turned the activity of watching television into something positive and productive.

At KCET, PBS’s West Coast flagship station, concern for children is a big part of our mission and vision of the future. Our mission statement, “to educate and inspire by providing unique and valuable programs and services to diverse communities,” guides our decisions, our actions and our thinking every day. And it particularly guides our efforts for young viewers.

With a broadcasting signal that extends throughout Southern and Central California, we serve the largest and most diverse region of any public television station in the country. Each week, more than 2.5 million households--400,000 of them in Orange County--watch KCET.

There is no single channel that offers more high-quality children’s programming than KCET.

We provide more than 40 hours of morning and afternoon programming for children each week, including “Sesame Street,” “Reading Rainbow,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” “Barney & Friends” and our own two acclaimed national productions, “Storytime” and “The Puzzle Place.”

But there’s more to our educational mission than just high-quality broadcasting. Using our children’s programming to its fullest advantage, KCET was one of the first model-site public television stations to launch “PTV: Ready to Learn,” a comprehensive service designed to help prepare young children for school through an expanded children’s broadcast schedule, educational and highly entertaining segments between the programs and a variety of outreach services in the community.

KCET works with the Children’s Television Workshop to implement Sesame Street PEP (Preschool Education Program), which trains child-care providers to effectively use “Sesame Street” in their classrooms.

In Orange County, we have trained more than 100 child-care workers during the last two years and will conduct several more training workshops in 1995.

KCET’s non-broadcast outreach extends to PBS’s Count on Me Math Collaborative Project. Working with educators, we create informal community education projects to help parents and other care givers of students in grades one through three demonstrate beginning math and science projects.

KCET also supports PBS Mathline, a new, interactive, computer-based program designed to help improve American math teaching methods in grades five through eight. It is designed to teach educators how to get students involved in math through a curriculum that promotes hands-on math lessons applicable to daily life. It currently is being tested in 21 Southland schools, including four in Huntington Beach, Anaheim, Irvine and Santa Ana.

With a wide variety of special materials, programs and other off-air activities, KCET reaches into our community and into our schools, making the lessons of our television programs even more useful and accessible.

Congressional leaders have threatened to “zero out” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which would eliminate all federal funding for public television and radio. While federal funding constitutes only 18% of the entire public broadcasting budget, every federal dollar helps radio and television stations across the country raise four to five additional dollars from private sources.

What those legislators fail to recognize or acknowledge is that PBS’s programming and community outreach activities play a major role in shaping young people’s lives. At a time when Californians are actively seeking ways to better educate our children, PBS and KCET are making important contributions both on and off the air.

Just ask Roseanne.