In just a couple weeks, Mitch Hopper will
turn off the spotlights and floodlights in the Illinois State Board
of Education’s television studio, probably for the last time.
A staff member since 1971, Hopper is the last professional from a
TV operation that once sent programs all over the United States.
“We had over a thousand
programs,” Gloria Ruff recalls. Ruff, the audiovisual
librarian for the state board, retired from the agency in 2003. The
library was the studio’s main distribution arm. Programs made
there — and programs acquired from other places and
duplicated to the education agency’s videotape — went
to public and private schools, colleges, prisons, and public and
commercial TV stations. Ruff recalls shipping a state-board TV
program about 12-month schooling to New Zealand.
The library was shut down by a division of
ISBE in 2002. “They just closed it,” Ruff says,
recalling that there was no wind-down — the day the library
closed was the day service ended. Now the studio and
program-duplication facilities are being closed, too. “When
June 30 comes, it will no longer actively be used as a TV
studio,” says Becky Watts, ISBE director of public
information.
You don’t need a degree in mass
communications or electronics to draw a parallel between the
decline of ISBE television and the budget woes of the state itself.
“The governor called on the agency . .
. to streamline in as many places as possible,” Watts says,
“so that we can direct as much of the education budget as
possible directly to Illinois classrooms.”
She mentions — more than once — a
pressing need for ISBE to reduce the costs of its main Springfield office by cutting leased floor
space. The agency’s once-extensive printing plant is also gone,
Watts notes: “We no longer have printing presses at the State
Board of Education.”
Amid laments over the loss of a place where
award-winning programs once were created are hints of recurring
problems in blending technology into education.
For example, the library included many motion
pictures for use on portable classroom projectors. Most were titles
that couldn’t be converted to videotape. In some cases, the
original producers wouldn’t permit the conversion; in others, there was little demand.
“We had the films, too,” Ruff recalls, “but nobody
took the films.”
She thinks agency management was reluctant to
convert the library’s tapes to DVD recordings. Across
Jefferson Street from the former library, in the ISBE
television-studio facility, some video discs in recent years,
copies of newly produced programs, had been made, but that’s
a different matter from converting a 1,000-title library from tape
to disc. Watts, who has been an ISBE executive for only a few
months, doesn’t know whether the idea was discussed.
Educators have usually hoped that the newest mass
medium would revolutionize teaching. They have almost always been
disappointed, although the verdict is still out on educational
applications of the Internet. Places for the phonograph and radio were
found in classrooms, but neither made fundamental changes in teaching
methods or student achievement. Until the l990s, TV programs seemed to
promise major improvements in classroom presentations, homeschooling,
and teacher training.
It isn’t clear whether the Internet is
more compelling — or better. In District 186, Sue Ruff
— director of information and technology for the Springfield
School District and Gloria Ruff’s daughter-in-law — has
noticed an interesting conversion. “The TV has become a
display,” she says. Television picture tubes are usually
larger than computer displays, so some of the district’s
classroom TVs are now used for computer data, permitting more
students to watch a single screen.
The Springfield public-school system, once a
frequent user of ISBE television programs, now operates Insight
Cable TV’s educational-access Channel 22. District 186
continues to use some other educational television, including the
highly regarded language-skills series Reading Rainbow. “If
you have the tape, it’s obviously clearer,” Sue Ruff
says, comparing conventional TV with programming on the Internet.
Watts, who is working with Hopper to parcel
out the remaining TV programming and paper files, compliments the
studio’s staff: “They have done award-winning work and
have been groundbreaking in the technology area.” All
went to other ISBE jobs or retired.
“Some of the equipment will be used by
other departments within this agency, and at this time we are
finalizing an interagency agreement with the Illinois Information
Service of CMS [the Department of Central Management Services], and
some of the equipment may come into play in that interagency
agreement,” Watts says. IIS operates a modest television
studio in a building just a half-block from ISBE. Files of historic
documents on Illinois public broadcasting will go to the Illinois
State Archives. Programs such as In
Mr. Lincoln’s Footstepsand Echoes of Abraham Lincoln, once uplinked to satellites serving U.S. public TV
stations, and the award-winning Survival
in Auschwitz, may go there, too. The
files of stock tape footage, showing students and schools, probably
can’t be transferred anywhere. The original permissions for
its use in programs and public-service announcements were granted
only to the ISBE.
In TV and the movies, some visual effects are
transitions between scenes. There are “dissolves” and
“wipes.” Another one, often used as a closing, could
also describe the end of ISBE’s television production:
“fade to black.”
Bud Bartlett, a local broadcast veteran and a regular contributor to Illinois Times, was employed
by ISBE in the 1970s and ’80s.
This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2005.
