47 U.S.C. § 394 — Establishment of National Endowment

(a) Purpose: This section exists to improve children's education by creating and producing TV programming aimed at building basic intellectual skills. (b) Establishment; contracts and grants: The Secretary directs a new National Endowment for Children's Educational Television. To run it, the Secretary may contract with the Corporation to produce educational children's TV programming, and may make grants directly to people who want to create and produce such programming. Before making grants or awarding contracts, the Secretary must consult the Advisory Council on Children's Educational Television. Any contract or grant comes with a condition on the programming: for the first two years after it is produced, it can only go to public and noncommercial television licensees and permittees; after that, it can go to any commercial TV licensee, permittee, or cable system operator, at a price the Secretary sets to ensure the widest practical distribution — but only if that licensee, permittee, or operator does not interrupt the programming with commercial ads. The Secretary may also let the programming be distributed through other media, and may set conditions on that distribution as part of any contract or grant. The Secretary can waive the two-year public-TV-first rule if the Secretary finds that neither public nor noncommercial TV licensees will have a chance to air the programming during those first two years. (c) Criteria for contracts and grants; applications: The Secretary, advised by the Advisory Council, must set criteria for awarding contracts and grants under this section. These criteria must match the section's purpose and be shared with interested parties on request. The criteria must include ways to maximize how much programming gets produced with Endowment money; minimize the costs of picking grant recipients, administering the contracts and grants, and administering the programming production itself; and otherwise maximize the share of Endowment money that goes toward actual programming production costs. Grant applications must be submitted to the Secretary in whatever form and with whatever information the Secretary requires by regulation. (d) Amount of grants: When the Secretary approves a grant application under (b), the Secretary decides the grant amount, but it cannot be more than 75 percent of what the Secretary determines is the reasonable, necessary project cost. (e) Advisory Council on Children's Educational Television: The Secretary must create this Council, appoint ten members, and name one of them Chairman. Members serve two-year terms and cannot serve more than three terms in a row. They must have expertise in education, psychology, child development, television programming, or related fields. Federal officers and employees cannot be members. When traveling away from home for Council business, members serve without pay but get travel expenses, including a daily allowance instead of reimbursing actual costs, following the rules in section 5703 of title 5. The Council meets when the Chairman calls a meeting, and advises the Secretary on making contracts and grants under this section. (f) Recordkeeping relating to grants; audits: Every grant recipient must keep records the Secretary needs to do the Secretary's job — including records showing how much grant money was received and how it was spent, the project's total cost, how much of that cost came from other sources, and anything else needed for a proper audit. The Secretary and the Comptroller General (or their authorized representatives) can inspect any of the recipient's books, documents, papers, and records connected to the grant, for audit purposes. (g) Issuance of rules and regulations: The Secretary may make whatever rules and regulations are needed to carry out this section, including rules about which project applications get priority and how much money each contract or grant should be. (h) Authorization of appropriations; availability: Congress authorized these amounts for the Secretary to use under this section: $2,000,000 for fiscal year 1991, $4,000,000 for fiscal year 1992, $5,000,000 for fiscal year 1993, and $6,000,000 for fiscal year 1994. Money appropriated for a given fiscal year stays available for contracts and grants on projects whose applications were approved and submitted within one year after that fiscal year ends. (i) Definitions: "Educational television programming for children" means any TV program aimed at an audience of children age 16 or younger, designed to help their intellectual development — but this does not include a program aimed at a general audience that children might also happen to watch. "Person" means an individual, partnership, association, joint stock company, trust, corporation, or state or local government entity.