KCPT goes beyond the broadcast to present opportunities to see talented artists featured on air in person and explore our local community with special concerts and events. Our members enjoy the best seats and exclusive Meet & Greet opportunities while supporting KCPT and the award-winning programming the community expects and depends on. When you participate in KCPT events, you provide support that continues to make great programming and events possible.
The tallies are in for the 2012 KCPT PBS Kids GO! Writers Contest! This year there were a total of 45 stories entered.
The contest, presented locally by KCPT with national funding support from Studentpublishing.com, encourages children in grades K-3 in the Kansas City region and in communities across the country to celebrate the power of language and creativity by creating and submitting original stories and illustrations. KCPT was one of sixty-three public television stations across the country that participated in this year’s contest.
All first place winners from KCPT’s contest will be entered into the national PBS KIDS GO! Writers Contest, where they will compete against area winners from across the county.
KCPT’s 2012 PBS Kids GO! Writers Contest First Place Winners
Kindergarten – Furry Cat Has a Birthday Party by Alex Beeman
1st Grade – My Baby Sister by Estelle May
2nd Grade – The Cat Who Wanted to Fly by Keagan Iris Bailey
3rd Grade – The Waterfall by Amelia Kline
Second Place Winners
Kindergarten – The Butterfly at the Farm by EmmaLyn Burnett
1st Grade – The 3 Pigs Return by Maureen Tuohey
2nd Grade – The Pet Shop by Jillian Staver
3rd Grade – Farmer Boys by Daniel Sliker
Third Place Winners
Kindergarten – The Owl by Autumn Ferrante
1st Grade – If I Was by Gracelynn Xia
2nd Grade – The Soap Story of Natalie Soap by Natalie Thompson
3rd Grade – The Storm by Tanner McDaniel
Honorable Mention
Kindergartern – Pluto Got Sad by Aubrey Pritchett
1st Grade – Boomer and the Cave Mystery – Elizabeth Place
2nd Grade – The Alien by Akerth Jain
3rd Grade – The Mean Mirror by Makayla McClenahan
The PBS KIDS GO! Writers Contest is produced annually by PBS KIDS and managed and created by WNED-TV Buffalo/Toronto, and is a part of PBS KIDS Raising Readers, a national initiative that uses the power of public media to build the reading skills of children ages two to eight. More information on PBS KIDS Raising Readers and the PBS KIDS GO! Writers Contest can be found at pbskids.org/read.
Join KCPT and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art May 4 at 6pm for a special premiere of the new KCPT documentary “Putting Down Roots: Roxy Paine’s Ferment,” about the creation of the brilliant sculpture. After the film, curators and the film’s producer Randy Mason will host a discussion about the newest addition to the Kansas City Sculpture Park.
The event is FREE. but tickets are required for admission. Reserve your seat on the Nelson-Atkins’ events page.
Explore the outdoors this spring with a visit to a local park! As part of the nation-wide PBS Kids Explore the Outdoors campaign, Ironwoods Park in Leawood, KS will be hosting a Self-Guided Scavenger Hunt. on Saturday, April 28th from 10am to 5pm.
Stop by the Prairie Oak Nature Center in Ironwood Park to pick-up a map and instructions for a special wildlife scavenger hunt. In addition to the Nature Center, a children’s playground and trails, the park includes the Historic Oxford School House, which will be open from 11am – 2pm.
Make tracks to pbsparents.org/outdoors and see how you can make any day a PBS KIDS day in the park.
Author Christopher B. Leinberger describes how government policy over the last 60 years – driven by the auto and oil industry – has encouraged suburban sprawl with its strip malls and isolated housing developments. The result: decline of community, urban decay, pollution, and a rise in obesity and asthma. But there’s a new approach (or perhaps it’s an old approach) in which citizens live, work, and play within easy walking distance.
Developer and educator Leinberger is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and is director of the Graduate Real Estate Program at the University of Michigan.
Make Your Reservation
Christopher B. Leinberger: The Option of Urbanism
April 18, 2012 – Reception: 6pm — Program: 6:30pm
Location: Central Library, Kansas City Public Library, 14 West 10th Street, Kansas City, MO 64105
Join KCPT on Sunday, May 20 for a fun evening celebrating everything Sherlock as we watch the final episode The Reichenback Falls on the big screen in KCPT’s Community Room. Vivien Jennings from Rainy Day Books will give a talk about Sherlock Holmes and the ongoing influence of the character in literature.
Although Shukree Hassan Tilghman begins More Than A Month with the goal of ending Black History Month, by the end of the documentary he has developed a more nuanced approach to celebrating and acknowledging the history of African Americans.
After viewing the film at KCPT’s February Community Cinema event, many attendees seemed to share Tilghman’s conflicted feelings about the month.
Dr. Doretha Williams, who is the executive director of the Black Archives of Mid-America helped facilitate discussion about the film and the role of Black History Month in our community and schools. Like Tilghman, Williams, who grew up in Topeka, KS, says that she has happy childhood memories of Black History Month. “I remember dressing up as and playing Harriet Tubman and leading the other kindergartners to freedom,” said Williams.
Black Archives of Mid-America Executive Director Doretha Willams leads discussion of the film More Than a Month.
Discussion topics ranged from how history is recounted and by whom to the inevitable consequence of corporate and commercial use of Black History Month.
Here are some of the comments and reactions of those that attended:
-Perhaps Black History is hard for people to incorporate into American History because of the shame associated with it. That way the power-brokers don’t have to deal with the shame and wrong-doing. The only history we’re getting has to be cleansed, we’re not talking about the rape of black women. Anything that happens in the US is part of American history. Celebrating Black inventors, leaders and revolutionaries like we currently do is great, but what’s missing is acknowledging the shame of slavery.
-I sympathize with the mom in the film who took it upon herself to teach her daughter about slavery. American Indians have the same problems that Tilghman presents in the film. We have to tell our story to our own kids all the time. It’s hard though when you’re contradicting what’s in the text book and your kid doesn’t know what to believe.
-I take issue with the men reenacting and celebrating the Confederacy and flying the Confederate flag. They say it’s not just a symbol of racism and slavery, but it’s akin to wearing a swastika.
-I think there is still a place for the celebration and acknowledgment that comes with Black History Month, but we should also work to incorporate and add these powerful stories to the main curriculum.
-Tilghman has really reminded me as a mom that I need to shake things up and push for 365 days of Black History! I can remember when I was little and it was just a week. A month is a mark of progress, but we can’t be compliant or just eliminate Black History Month until we have something better to replace it with.
-I think if we eliminated Black History Month, we’d be forgetting whose shoulders we stand on and the struggle to establish Black History Month.
-It seems that the corporate side of Black History Month is inevitable. There seemed to be some disgust around the Heineken’s Black History advertisement. My question is are we disgusted with the product or all mass-marketing? I mean would we have the same issue if the ad was for Colt 45?
-I remember the Kings of Africa Budweiser campaign from a few years back. I think they is a larger issue there with marketing alcohol to our young people.
-I think the high school requirement for Black History is just awesome. My mother went to the all-black Lincoln High School in the 1930s in Kansas City and Black History was a requirement then.
-Black History always felt like a funeral for me of all the past achievements and leaders. I think Black History needs to start as far back as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and not stop. I agree wholeheartedly with Tilghman that Public Enemy should be included!
Listen to KCUR’s interview on Central Standard with Shukree Hassan Tilghman and UMKC History Professor Pellom McDaniels III, who is featured in the film.
Create and discover African American History from the palm of your hand with More Than A Month’s accompanying smartphone application: More Than a Map(p).
Join KCPT for a day of exploration and surprises. Support KCPT and you and a companion can bring up to 3 items for evaluation and appraisal on Saturday, April 21, 2012 at the Overland Park Convention Center. Choose morning or afternoon sessions and begin looking around the house and Aunt Mildred’s for items to learn more about.
To interrupt violence in Kansas City, Aim4Peace believes that you must have your doctorate in “Streetology.” This means that with training and a research-based approach, the best people to intervene and prevent violent crime are those who were once the perpetrators.
This method of violence prevention is profiled in the Frontline documentary The Interrupters, which aired on KCPT on February 14, 2012. The film follows the courageous work of the CeaseFire violence prevention project, which treats the violence plaguing some of Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods like an infectious disease. The Interrupters illustrates that much like a major health epidemic, shootings and retaliatory violence can spread through a community infectiously.
In many US cities, violence is considered a major public health issue for urban areas where homicide is a leading cause of death and portions of the population even expect that they will die as a result of violent crime.
CeaseFire uses the following three-pronged approach, which is akin to public health methods of controlling diseases:
Using this public health approach, CeaseFire has effectively been able to reduce the number of homicides and shootings in several of Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods. Kansas City’s Aim4Peace, which was founded in 2008, uses the CeaseFire model and focuses its efforts on the approximately 30 square-mile area of the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department’s East Patrol. For the past 20 years the East Patrol has had the highest number of violent crimes, drive-by shootings and homicides in the city. Currently Aim4Peace has five mediators, who work directly to interrupt violence. Last November, Aim4Peace lost one of their own when, according to an article in the Kansas City Star, Aim4Peace mediator Terrance Jackson was gunned down while working.
Aside from Chicago and Kansas City, the only other city with a violence prevention group using the CeaseFire approach is Safe Streets project in Baltimore.
Learn more about Aim4Peace, volunteer opportunities and sign a commitment to peace on their website.
Who are you? Where do you come from? These are the basic questions at the core of the new 10-part PBS series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Join KCPT at the Black Archives of Mid-America on Thursday, March 15th at 7pm for a sneak peek of Finding Your Roots. The Archive’s Executive Director Dr. Doretha Williams and a panel with scholars from area universities and colleges will discuss the importance of race, genealogy and community as well as tools for discovering your own family’s history. The event is free and open to the public. Space is limited. Reserve your seat at here.
The Black Archives of Mid-America is located at 1722 E. 17th Terrace
Kansas City, MO 64108.
Watch Preview on PBS. See more from Finding Your Roots.
“School is a safe spot, not a hate spot” and “Bullying is an act of insecurity #beyourself” are some of the messages from anti-bullying PSAs created by students at two local high schools. As part of the national Public Media initiative Not In Our Town (NIOT), KCPT asked local high school students to create anti-bullying PSAs for use on-air and in area classrooms.
Both PSAs will premiere around the February 13, 2012 broadcast of the latest NIOT documentary, Not In Our Town: Class Actions, which showcases how university and school campuses across the country have found positive ways to stand up against hate and bullying.
Students at FL Schlagle High School in Kansas City, KS decided to focus their PSA on cyber bullying. They polled fellow students to find out how social media is used to bully and then came up with ways to handle it. Throughout the spot, masked students hold signs with hash tagged messages like “Once you tweet it, it’s there forever #thinkbeforeyoutweet.”
Fairfax Learning Center’s student council came up with the slogan “School is a safe spot, not a hate spot,” designed a poster, and scripted a bullying skit. Because Fairfax Learning Center does not have a video production class or equipment, KCPT’s production crew went to film the skit and then edited it together.
The PSAs will continue to air on KCPT for the next year and will also be available to area teachers along with classroom resources from Not In Our Town. Educators are encouraged to sign-up to receive these resources and updates from the initiative here.
