LOUISA, KY. — A protest of some subject matter on a little watched Foothills Lawrence County channel that usually runs old basketball and volleyball games, glitched into a channel that contained “sensitive subject matter’ according to a press release from Lawrence County Schools to parents Thursday.
The term “sensitive subject matter” has not been defined further by the school system or Foothills, which also has a press release containing an apology to viewers.
Foothills Communications
Foothills TV Subscribers: We have been made aware of programming that was aired tonight on Foothills channel 98 that contained sensitive subject matter.
Channel 98 is dedicated to the Lawrence County school system, and all content aired on this channel is provided directly by the school system. Although this programming was outside of Foothills’ control, we take this matter seriously and are working to address the situation and prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
Thank you to those who kindly brought this to our attention. Your trust truly matters to us, and we appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to resolve this issue.
–Foothills
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Lawrence County Schools Statement regarding LC cable channel:
Earlier tonight, content aired on Channel 98 that was not directly selected or approved by our school district. When our local school videos finish playing, our server system for the cable channel had been set to automatically fill the remaining airtime with education videos from YouTube. Tonight the system pulled in an unintended video from YouTube. As soon as we were made aware of the issue, our staff took action to shut down the feed immediately.
We are working to fix our system settings so that an issue like this will not happen again.
We apologize and appreciate our community’s understanding.
–Katie Webb
QUESTIONS ABOUND AROUND ISSUE
The issue has been front and center in state and even national news concerning social media use in school and especially by students. Many of the detractors of media based education point to such incidents as a basis for personal school based use of technology.
What exactly does the term ‘sensitive subject matter’ mean in this case?
This case was an accident, who is in charge at School and TV station?
What is this channel doing to advance Lawrence County Schools, anyway?
We have not received a personal answer from LC Schools chief Katie Webb and will add it if she responds.
