Out of obscurity
While channel 17 kept broadcasting to an audience that almost exclusively consisted of students, channel 2 had emerged as the primary public broadcasting outlet in South Florida. Long a joint effort between the school board and the private Community Television Foundation of South Florida (CTF), this arrangement was consecrated as two separate FCC licenses sharing the channel in 1970. WTHS-TV continued to broadcast during weekday daytime hours to provide in-school programs, while non-school fare was provided by the foundation under the new call sign of WPBT.[15] The stated intention was to sunset WTHS-TV after five years and transition its broadcasts to a closed-circuit system connecting the schools, ceding channel 2 to WPBT full-time.[16]
The arrangement went sour in 1975, when CTF sought to take full control. However, the school board refused, stating that WLRN-TV and other services were not yet available to a majority of students.[17] The inadequate WLRN-TV facilities were cited by one school board member as a poor compensation for giving up half of channel 2; by 1978, the station was operating at an effective radiated power of 38,000 watts, using a transmitter it had acquired used from WHRO-TV in Hampton, Virginia, in 1961.[18] However, relief was on the way in the form of a major signal upgrade to WLRN-TV. In August 1978, a rebuilt facility was activated and effective radiated power increased to 2.83 million watts, extending the station's city-grade coverage to take in Cutler Ridge to the south and Boca Raton to the north.[19] In addition to Something on Seventeen and educational courses for schools and the general public, the station also aired local government meetings.[20]
In 1983, WLRN radio and television moved from the decaying Lindsey Hopkins High School building, where radio had been since 1948 and where television operations of the district began in 1955, to a new facility on the same site.[21] By 1985, the station was producing a panoply of local shows to supplement PBS productions, ranging from panel discussions on public issues to sewing advice and how-tos on acting, as well as high school sports telecasts.[22] When an appeals court ruling that year struck down FCC regulations requiring must-carry carriage of all TV stations in a local area, two Miami cable systems with 70,000 subscribers pulled WLRN.[23] The station boasted, in response to it being dropped by a system in Fort Lauderdale, that its local programming output was only surpassed by WGBH-TV in Boston.[24] The high school sports broadcasts were dropped in 1993,[25] while school board meeting coverage on television was also curtailed to end at 6 p.m. even if the meeting was still in progress.[26]
