“If business leaders want to transform the work force, we can do that,” he said. “We can help. Our job is to provide online instruction, and we already do that.”

The move into work-force training was natural for KLVX, which operates the local Public Broadcasting Service television station Channel 10. The station has long been a partner with the Clark County School District. KLVX has produced 160 course offerings for the district’s Virtual High School.

An additional 110 teacher-training and certification courses are offered by KLVX’s TeacherLine program.

Partnerships are being considered with the state’s higher education institutions. Additional training grants may come through a partnership with the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation.

For the rest of the article, go to Work This Way

When the solar panels are generating excess energy, the power flows back into the city’s main power grid at a savings for Vegas PBS, Axtell said.

Vegas PBS is a self-funded service that is sponsored by the district. Its new facility is home to the district’s Virtual High School, which offers online high school courses.

Axtell looks at school rooftops as an energy asset, much like a river or a ray of sunshine. Because many district schools share the same design, there would be economies of scale in planting solar farms on school rooftops across the Las Vegas Valley.

“You have a single property owner that has large expanses of flat roofs, that all have the same exact designs because you have cookie-cutter schools. It really allows for the efficiency in the planning and the installation of solar farms,” Axtell said.

“You do it for one high school, there’s probably 10 others that have the same footprint. So you don’t have the same expense of engineering.”

For the rest of the article, go to School district turning to solar

Vegas PBS has completed its move into its new Education Technology Campus after more than a decade of planning and construction.

The eco-friendly building is home to Vegas PBS’ operations and production services in addition to its emergency alert efforts, and also supports the Clark County School District Virtual High School facilities, which focus on distance online education.

The 112,000-square-foot, $45 million building funded through a private and public partnership, was under consideration in 1999 after a Federal Communications Commission order requiring broadcasters to transition to digital broadcasting.

Vegas PBS provides broadcast TV and cable over seven channels with an additional six educational channels provided directly to Clark County School District classrooms.

Eight sites were considered before officials picked the 3000 block of East Flamingo Road, east of Eastern Avenue, officials said. The old studio off Flamingo Road is less than a mile to the west.

For the rest of the article, go to Vegas PBS moves final gear to new campus

Tom Axtell has seen KLVX-TV, Channel 10, grow from a single-channel operation to a multiplatform media company during his 16-year tenure as general manager.

The June 28 dedication of the $60 million Educational Technology Campus is the latest, but not the last, evolution of the local Public Broadcasting Service.

“We’ve thought through what we are,” Axtell said. “We are very good at creating content and very good at distributing content. Our role in the community as a local media company is to work with organizations to empower them through the use of the technologies and the distribution networks we have.”

The 112,000-square-foot facility on East Flamingo Road is home to operations and production services for KLVX-TV, also known as Vegas PBS. The facility also houses the Clark County School District’s Virtual High School and educational media database.

Besides seven broadcast channels, KLVX-TV oversees six closed-circuit channels, a vast Internet database of teaching material accessible to teachers and children, and a Homeland Security database of building blueprints for police and fire departments to access during a civil emergency, among other holdings.

KLVX-TV produced 23,700 hours of content last year, only 400 hours of which ever appeared on its seven broadcast channels.

The remaining content includes programs for the Clark County School District, the University of Nevada, Reno, and other groups in the state.

While programs for the school district are produced at cost, other organizations pay a small fee, producing an income stream for the nonprofit.

The facility also produced 160 courses for the virtual high school.

The key is to create a sustainable business model and never lose sight of the tradition and history of public service, Axtell said.

“That is very different business model than buying syndicated programming and putting it up at 8 o’clock and hoping people will tune in,” Axtell said.

For the rest of the article, go to New tech campus marks milestone for KLVX-TV