Locals plead for school district to keep longtime radio station. Here’s their plan
The future of the 36-year-old radio station tucked into a pocket of the Peninsula School District is still up in the air.
KGHP-FM has been on air since 1988 and is owned by PSD. It’s located on the Peninsula High School campus.
Over the years it’s been used for different types of coverage, including sports, community emergency communications and alerts, and as a space for high school students to learn broadcast skills and for volunteers to create their own music and entertainment programs.
After the 2021-22 school year, longtime broadcast teacher Leland Smith retired. He’d taught the educational broadcast program for over 25 years.
When he retired, the district’s Career and Technical Education department decided to cut the program based on decreasing student interest. Kris Hagel, the district’s executive director of digital learning, shared at a November KGHP meeting that they started to see a decrease in student interest back in 2014.
Then the station manager position, held by Spencer Abersold, was part of a 2023 budget cut. The district cut certain positions to make up for a $12 million deficit in its budget. He had managed the station for over 20 years.
Although KGHP is still on air with participation from volunteers, its current broadcasting is very limited.
Current broadcasting on KGHP offers some local sports coverage, automated DJ segments, and audiobook readings.
In November the district invited those interested in the station’s future to attend a meeting. The room had about 30 people who all had some sort of connection to the station. There were former volunteers, former students and listeners.
Superintendent Krestin Bahr said at the November KGHP meeting that the district is committed to working through what KGHP’s future could be and that a school district having its own radio station is very rare.
She said KGHP is “a local treasure.”
District officials and attendees at the Novemeber KGHP meeting went back and forth about what’s possible for the station’s future.
The group reconvened Thursday, Feb. 8.
Hagel shared Feb. 8 that it costs the district about $12,000 a year to maintain the license and station, based on last year’s numbers. That accounts for a contract engineer who is paid around $3,000 for the upkeep of the equipment and other things.
“The value on the open market of the station as a whole right now is $100,000,” Hagel shared.
The power tower required to power that radio system and equipment is sponsored by the Peninsula Light Company, which only charges the district about $1 a year, Hagel said.
How likely is it that PSD will offer a broadcast course again?
Community members Feb. 8 pleaded for the district to consider restructuring the course to make it more appealing to students.
Abersold and Smith both spoke about the decline of student interest in the former course at the November meeting.
“I’d like to really push back on this idea that there’s no interest in broadcasting,” Abersold said. “We all know that you have TikTok, you have Facebook, you can all see kids broadcasting themselves every single day, hundreds of thousands of them. They’re making huge careers out of it. ... You also have television, internet, you have radio, and that field is expanding and there are so many jobs in that field that need people to fill them.”
Hagel said they could barely fill one class for the last semester it was offered in 2019. At that time there were 19 students in the class, he said.
Smith pointed out that student interest declined around the same time there were changes to state graduation requirements.
CORE 24 requirements say that 17 out of a student’s 24 total credits toward graduation must be core classes. This limits the number of electives a student can take.
“We’re required to offer courses where there’s high student interest that aligns with the graduation and career pathways, and we can maximize student enrollment in those classes for financial and other reasons,” John Yellowlees, the district’s chief academic officer for teaching and learning, said at the November KGHP meeting. “And it wasn’t sustainable from that perspective.”
Hagel added at the Feb. 8 meeting that the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) requires a CTE program “to show that there’s a skills gap in the market, and that this program is going to provide jobs that the market needs.”
Hagel said for a radio DJ in the state of Washington, only 40 job openings annually are projected. He said that number is not enough to justify offering the broadcast program.
“This is not a program that we have budget for moving forward,” Hagel said Feb. 8. “This conversation is unfortunately not going to be successful if we’re going to try and reinstitute a radio program, because at this time, that’s not where the district is looking.”
Many in the audience wanted the district to broaden the opportunities the station can provide, beyond just radio.
Jeremy Larcom spoke about two other high school radio stations in the state, at Mercer Island High School and Nathan Hale High School.
“There are two other radio stations in the state that have a top notch program and are doing these things,” he said. “Web design is a part of it, digital media, all of that can be encompassed by this.”
Larcom added: “There’s a chasm in terms of the branding, in terms of the student interest, in terms of the entire echelon of what we were doing, as opposed to what the other two successful radio stations in the state are doing.”
Mercer Island’s radio station has 150 students involved daily, according to their website.
“It is the class that everybody wants to get into, because it’s done well and it’s done with integrity and excellence,” Larcom said.
Katie Harrison, the mother of a 2018 PHS graduate, said the KGHP program was a “huge confidence booster” for her son.
“He was the kid who didn’t have many friends,” Harrison said. “And suddenly I saw this shyness fall away, and this quiet confidence, and he was out speaking to his peers and interviewing them. He said it gave him a voice at Peninsula, that when he would interview his fellow students that gave them a voice.”
She went on to say her son is now a senior airman with the United States Air Force serving in the intelligence field.
“He briefs high ranking members of the military, which can be intimidating, especially as a senior airman,” she said. “... He has to be accurate and concise and convey his message in a very meaningful way. And that was first cultivated right here on KGHP.”
Others in the room applauded after Harrison said: “I think instead of saying ‘no,’ or ‘we can’t,’ we say ‘how do we make it work, how do we find the money and how do we find the interest?’”
Kristen Knapp, a PHS graduate of 1985, wanted to know how they could find the money and what the district would need from the community to keep the program alive.
“This program needs to not leave this school district,” Knapp said. “And the reasons for making it leave the school district in my opinion are not valid.”
Hagel said after salary and benefits, to hire another teacher for a broadcast program, they’d need around $150,000.
Hagel agreed to work with the community to create a survey in the near future for students to take in order to gauge current student interest in a broadcast program with new or different aspects.
He added that students have expressed interest in e-sports, also known as professional video game streaming, and that they could explore that.
A local nonprofit could take over the station’s license
The station’s Federal Communications Commission License does not allow it to be sold for profit. It can be transferred to another nonprofit or religious organization, Hagel said.
A small group of community members has stepped up to start a nonprofit. They are interested in obtaining the license and continuing KGHP.
If the nonprofit were to take over the license, students could still seek opportunities with KGHP through an internship or work-based learning for class credit.
Some argued KGHP could reach more students if it were to stay inside the school.
Ty Rosenow has “gathered former students, volunteers, and current/former nationwide radio broadcast professionals and started a nonprofit educational organization in November called ‘Friends of KGHP’ so we can keep the radio station because we still see the value of radio for the community, educational, and emergency purposes for the Gig Harbor-Key Peninsula community,” he said in a Jan. 12 email to the school district and the Gateway.
Rosenow, who is a KGHP alumnus, is the director of Friends of KGHP. Currently there are two other members, who are also KGHP alumni: Larcom and Shelly Honeysuckle.
All three have decades of experience in radio.
They have established 501(c)(3) nonprofit status and are registered with the state, Larcom said.
Rosenow, who spoke more about the nonprofit at the Feb. 8 meeting, said they are looking for board members. They’d like to take over the management of the station.
When asked if he plans to offer additional broadcast opportunities beyond radio to students, Rosenow told the Gateway he does.
Honeysuckle most recently worked in the KGRG-FM radio station at Green River College, which recently hired a new executive director who came in and revamped the station to make it more appealing to students.
“KGRG is still fighting to make things work, and our numbers are still low,” she told the Gateway. “But, there’s ways to save it.”
If the nonprofit does not take over management, Rosenow told the Gateway they’d at least like to explore community funding to help the program continue.
Larcom and others pushed for keeping the studio on the PHS campus.
Hagel said at the November meeting that PHS staff would like to use the station’s space for other opportunities.
If they were to move the station to a different location, it would take about $10,000, according to the contract engineer, Hagel said.
A member of Gig Harbor Kiwanis, Joe Loya, asked if the station would have to move off campus if it was taken over by a nonprofit.
“I think there could be a transition period,” Hagel said “It’s really hard to secure where it is right now, with the building, with the facility, with the age of PHS, to keep the building secure.”
Hagel added: “That is a concern down there ... what is the liability of the district when there are volunteers in there late at night in the radio station?”
Rosenow told the Gateway if the station has to move and Friends of KGHP takes over management, he intends to keep the station somewhere in the Gig Harbor area.
Hagel said the earliest another meeting with the community and district staff to discuss the future of KGHP would happen is sometime near the end of the month.
They’d like to have the school board make a decision by the end of the school year, Hagel told the Gateway.
