$11 million for ‘Lions’ on PBS

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Barksdale Reading Institute have pledged a combined $11 million to fund the PBS Kids’ series “Between the Lions,” a learn-to-read program with high success rates in poor, rural communities.

Several university studies have shown increases in literacy skills among children who watched the program at schools in Kansas, Mississippi and New Mexico. Children’s programming is usually a “hand-to-mouth” operation, said Brigid Sullivan, vice president of children’s programming at WGBH in Boston, which produces the show, along with Sirius Thinking Ltd. and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. The unusual grant will fund 20 new episodes and help spread the program to Alaska, the Dakotas and Oklahoma, she said.

Unlike “Sesame Street,” which teaches letters and numbers, “Between the Lions” launched in 2000 with a kindergarten/first-grade curriculum using a combination of phonics and whole language approaches. “After we premiered it and got our first research results, we thought we should do the really hard thing of targeting the hardest-to-reach, hardest-to-teach kids,” Sullivan said. “We found a sub population of kids, hidden in some ways, kids who had difficulty knowing how to open a book and look at it or even hold a pencil in their hand.” The producers realized they needed to retool the program to add more fundamental skills such as how to use a book and read from left to right.

In a University of Pennsylvania study, young viewers “at risk” for reading failure dropped from 39% to 12% while those scoring above average in key literacy measures rose from 23% to 64%. None of the studies has focused on long-term results. However, Sullivan said: “Once you learn to read, you don’t unlearn it. It’s one of the transformative moments in one’s life.”

lynn.smith@latimes.com