MOBILE, Ala.—Kids in Mobile won’t be rotting their brain when they watch TV, as WALA-TV, a Meredith-owned Fox affiliate, has announced a partnership with Mobile County Public Schools to air live classroom lessons pre-K to 11th grade students starting Monday, April 13.
These classroom programs will be produced by the school district’s mcpss TV channel and broadcast on WALA-TV’s digital subchannel 10.6. In addition, it will be available over-the-air on Comcast channel 15, AT&T U-Verse On Demand channel 99, Mediacom channel 81 and on Roku devices through the Mobile County Public Schools channel.
The airing of classroom lessons on-air is in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Alabama schools were shutdown for the remainder of the school year by Alabama Governor Kay Ivey on March 26. The Mobile district is using these live broadcasts, as well as online classes and traditional paper packets, to continue children’s education.
WALA-TV will air 33 hours of lessons Monday through Friday, ranging from elementary reading and math, middle school social studies, high school biology, chemistry and algebra, art and music lessons and more. The full schedule of live classrooms is available on WALA-TV’s website and mcpss.com/coronavirus.
For high school seniors, WALA-TV is recognizing them with the “Saluting Our Seniors” program, presenting on-air accolades to the class of 2020. To be recognized on-air, viewers can submit a picture of a graduating senior, along with their name and school to WALA-TV’s website.
Public TV stations have been providing similar remote learning access during the pandemic.
“In Mobile County Public Schools, our goal during this pandemic is to educate all 53,000 of our students in a way that is equitable, regardless of a student’s access to computers and the internet, a student’s capabilities or a student’s cognitive levels,” said Chresal Threadgill, superintendent of Mobile County Public Schools. “This partnership with Fox 10 will allow us to share high-quality instruction from master teachers with our students.”
“This is a challenging situation for most of us, and if Fox 10 can do something to make the lives of local families even a little bit easier, we are excited to do it,” added Gary Yoder, vice president and general manager of WALA.
