Courtney Pledger to Step Down After 8 Years as Chief of Arkansas PBS

Executive Director Courtney Pledger consulted with Gov. Asa Hutchinson before announcing a new name for AETN: Arkansas PBS.

Courtney Pledger’s accomplished but heavily scrutinized eight-year career as head of Arkansas’ public television network is drawing to a close.

Pledger, appointed by former Gov. Asa Hutchinson, led the Arkansas Educational Television Network, rebranded as Arkansas PBS, as executive director and CEO. She announced Thursday that she is stepping down in May.

A Little Rock native and producer who formerly led the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Pledger was an innovator in public TV through the COVID pandemic but became a lightning rod for criticism and legislative rebuke. Recently, a leading critic has been conservative state Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Jonesboro, a fiery critic of diversity efforts and what he saw as poor financial oversight at Arkansas PBS.

Sullivan’s wife, Maria Sullivan, last year became a member of the Arkansas PBS Commission, which oversees the educational network.

Pledger took over the educational network in March 2017, filling a void left by the death of longtime AETN leader Allen Weatherly in November 2015.

Early staffing moves drew criticism, particularly the dismissal of Mona Dixon, a 32-year employee of the AETN Foundation, who appealed the decision and later accepted a settlement.

Pledger had been an executive producer for DreamWorks animation and senior vice president of development and production at Radical Pictures before starting as director of the Hot Springs documentary festival in 2012. She was born in Little Rock but raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and earned a bachelor of arts at Millsaps College in that city.

‘Transformative Leadership’

A news release from Arkansas PBS on Thursday praised Pledger’s “transformative leadership” and legacy of “transformative leadership and innovative growth across content, education, and community engagement.”

The network set high standards with a string of national awards, and Pledger helped transform AETN into a PBS stalwart, producing content across new media platforms.

The network evolved quickly during COVID as thousands of Arkansas students turned to TVs as classrooms, launching “Arkansas AMI” when schools shut down at the height of the pandemic.

“Pledger significantly increased the reach and impact of ArkansasIDEAS, the state’s most-used online professional development platform for teachers,” the news release said. “She has prioritized authentic Arkansas storytelling, leading to critically acclaimed programming that resonated with both local and national audiences.”

Pledger gave no reason for stepping down, but in her early 70s, she is beyond many people’s retirement age.

She was circumspect in looking back on her tenure in an email to Arkansas Business. “I really don’t have much to add [to a statement in the news release], but to reiterate my love of our unbelievable team and Arkansas PBS, and my wish for the station to thrive moving forward,” Pledger said in an email. “Arkansas, like all places, has a lot of needs, and always top of mind for the Arkansas PBS team is helping meet those needs while educating at the same time.”

Her statement on Thursday: 

“I have had more than eight extraordinary years at Arkansas PBS, building a phenomenal team eager to take on new challenges and collaborating with some of the very best independent creators and community partners in Arkansas. It has been my great honor to lead Arkansas PBS through a transformative time that points to the limitless potential of our statewide public media network.”

Top Accomplishments

Pledger introduced high school championships to the network’s sports coverage and expanded platforms for live arts and cultural programming. The network also emphasized government transparency via AR-CAN, the Arkansas Citizens Access Network, which live-streamed legislative and government commission meets, among other proceedings.

“Her tenure marked a deepening of Arkansas PBS’s community relevance, with an expanded multi-platform presence, robust social media engagement, and popular in-person events such as Arkansas PBS Family Day and ‘Arkansas Treasures,’ an ongoing program that brings Arkansans together around their family heirlooms and collectibles,” the release said.

West Doss, chair of the Arkansas PBS Commission, praised Pledger in a statement as “the catalyst of our success.” He said she “elevated Arkansas PBS to unprecedented heights, with 34 of the network’s 47 Mid-America Regional Emmys being awarded during her tenure, a number of Public Media Awards from the National Educational Telecommunications Association and several original programs now broadcast nationwide by PBS. She will be greatly missed.”

Arkansas PBS said the commission will meet “expeditiously” to consider a successor.

Audit Controversy

In recent years, Pledger faced grilling from lawmakers over audit reports that found the network’s accounting lax. A particular criticism was that it favored certain vendors and circumvented state procurement law through transactions that fell just below the state’s $20,000 threshold requiring larger deals to go through competitive bidding. Sullivan and other lawmakers seized on the audits, saying they revealed a “pattern” of questionable purchasing practices.

Sullivan, who filed a bill in the current legislative session to eliminate the Arkansas PBS Commission before pulling it back, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he held Pledger responsible for splitting big contracts and purchases to keep them below the $20,000 threshold.

“I’m not very familiar with how long she was there,” Sullivan told the Democrat-Gazette. “I’m most familiar with the last few years and the audits that PBS had that were very, very poor. I attribute that to her leadership and to the board also.”

But Pledger departs with an air of accomplishment. “I’m really proud of the education work and I kind of see it as an arc for us,” she told Arkansas Business in an extensive interview five years into her tenure. “We spent the first two -and-a-half years becoming forward-facing to produce content and distribute it. Then came COVID and AMI, or alternate methods of instruction, and it turned out we were more prepared than we thought we might be. There were nerves, but everybody just jumped in for school on the air. We got a real sense of what it feels like to be at the center of a strong community need and to be providing it.”