The Day You Begin, based on the book by Jacqueline Woodson, is a new one-hour animated special about four kids experiencing their first day of Kindergarten. PBS Kids VP of Content Adriano Schmid discusses the heart and humanity of the special, which premieres this Friday August 7th. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: How did you first discover the book, and as the VP of content decide, “Alright, this works with what we stand for here at PBS Kids,” and turning it into a special?

Adriano Schmid: So I joined PBS Kids four years ago, and at that time, the book had already been identified by some of my colleagues, and we were just figuring out what could we do with it. Everyone loved it, thought that it was an amazing piece of writing by Jacqueline Woodson, the illustrations by Rafael Lopez. All of that just presented itself to be a really beautiful experience for families. Not just for kids, but for families. And around that time, we were really thinking about specials because, as you know, PBS Kids… we have a lot of series, very successful series, long-running series. But we feel that there’s always that family time where maybe during one hour, young kids and parents or caregivers can just sit and then enjoy a story. And then we thought that we could have a few examples of book-based specials that could then provide the type of entertainment with the same type of educational mission that all the content for PBS Kids has. So The Day You Begin was perfect for it. There were a few conversations between Jacqueline Woodson, her representatives, different animation studios, until we got to a place where everyone was on board. And during that time, of course, I read the book several times and I was just in love with it. But a lot of other people were too. So it just felt like everyone wanting to be a part of this and help make this a reality, which is great.

JM: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And it’s so good that this is an hour — 45 minutes of the actual special — because we meet these four kids and their teacher, and we go on this journey with them. You have us take our time with them as they are taking their time understanding what Kindergarten is all about, and the pacing of it is really nice. What do you like the most about the arc of this story and the pacing of it?

AS: I will say that was a challenge, because the book itself, it’s a picture book, and then you get a general sense of the different characters. Angelina is the protagonist in the book. But we wanted to give different perspectives. So we wanted to give our audience the ability to find themselves through different characters. The way we talk about the first day of Kindergarten is youkind of have a little bit of executive function skills… it’s great that you come in with those or just to get you prepared for that experience. But the confidence to step into a room where you don’t know anybody and you are really not even sure about yourself. This is usually one of the first big experiences that a kid has outside the sort of a very protected environment of their home. So we really wanted to get inside these kids’ heads. Jacqueline really wanted to write the script. She had never written a script. This is the first adaptation of one of her picture books. We really wanted the experience to be an amazing one for her. So we put her working with a writer, Dana Chan, an amazing writer who had worked with us on “Alma’s Way”.

So between the two of them, they were able to craft the stories, and of course working with the advisors, educational advisors, pedagogues and other folks that we always like to offer as support for the writers and the production teams. So we were able to then define each of these four kids a little bit better, making sure that they were authentically represented, that they had a voice, and that they had a very specific… let’s say Achilles heel, something that they were particularly concerned or afraid of in terms of their first experience getting into that classroom. And then the idea was like how then can we make this an arc for the story? And of course, following the day of Kindergartner… how the day evolves. There’s recess. There’s lunchtime. There’s quiet time. So all of those different aspects of a typical day lent itself to the evolution to that arc of the story because the kids themselves are interacting with each other, and then they’re just figuring out everything that happens together — but also individually because they are, of course, different from each other.

JM: Angelina, Rigoberto, Minjin, Andre, they’re all fantastic. And they all learn so much over the course of the hour, over the course of their first day. Their teacher, Mr. Vevé, also… he’s very friendly, but he also admits he’s a little nervous because this is his first day with this group of kids as well. Does this character identify for you teachers in your life? Did it relate to you on that level — and the makers of this special on that level — of a teacher like this who is so genuine and just wants to do the best job that these teachers can possibly do for these students?

AS: Absolutely. Yeah. We did also talk to quite a few Kindergarten teachers just to make sure everything that Mr. Vevé does and says feels authentic. Among other things, we wanted to make sure that it was a male teacher because there’s not a lot of male Kindergarten teachers depicted. It’s usually a woman… a female role, and we wanted to make sure that we presented that. And then all of the nuances of presenting himself as nervous to Angelina, and then even forgetting about this audio sensitivity Andre has a couple times, it feels very human… which is great because we don’t want teachers also to appear as superhuman. But for the story itself, we really wanted it to be kid-led, children-led. We want these kids to figure out a lot of things for themselves. So there was a balance between these are not kids that were completely unsupervised. There was a responsible teacher there. But at the same time, this teacher was also learning about who these kids were and making sure that he was paying attention to those qualities that the kids were presenting. So at the end of that, I feel that everyone within the story and then everyone in the audience is just excited about what the second day of Kindergarten is gonna look like.

JM: Yes. It does leave you with that. It does leave you wanting more stories with these characters. Atomic Cartoons did the animation. They’ve been a part of a lot of animated series over the years. It’s a great look to the special. It’s really wholesome, and sincere, and nice and friendly for kids who are gonna be watching this. How was it working with them and creating this look?

AS: Oh, it was fantastic. We’ve worked with them for many years on “Molly of Denali”, so we had a good knowledge of their enthusiasm for the type of storytelling that is important for PBS Kids. And they jumped at the opportunity.

JM: You have this special, which is gonna be watched on television by millions and millions of families, and then do you say, “How do we also expand this out? How do we take this to other platforms?” When you look at a special like this, what are the possibilities that you see?

AS: So we always think about the platforms where kids are. There’s an actual portion of our audience that is gonna be watching the special on a linear channel, on broadcast. And then we also want to offer it for families on demand, and that’s where our website and our PBS Kids video app comes in. And we’re also on YouTube because we know that YouTube is a platform where kids and families are looking for content… high quality content. The way that we see social media, TikTok, Instagram, or any of these other, platforms, t’s a great way for us to communicate to parents, educators, and caregivers that this special is coming, that this is a special that we hope is going to be a staple. And every time around this time of the year, August, September, when kids are gonna go into Kindergarten for the first time, it is a tool. It can be a tool, an amazing, entertaining, very emotional tool for families to sit down and then watch it and then talk about it and have kids like, “Oh, that’s how it was for me,” or, ”I was nervous and now I’m a little bit less nervous,” or, “I have questions. Will my teacher be like Mr. Vevé?” So we want that piece of content to be there, and then it’s very important because we are also directing this to families, that parents, caregivers, educators know about it. I could even imagine Kindergarten teachers showing it to their kids in the first day of Kindergarten. Why not, right?

JM: That’d be great. That would be wonderful. ‘Cause yes, it is a great resource for so much information and so much that these kids and teachers are gonna go through on this first day, and it’s nice that you really have the kids in mind. You also have the parents in mind, because as the special also shows, the parents want what’s best for their children. They want them to have the best day and to make friends and to learn so much. So to have parents and kids in mind and to bookend the special in the way that you do with the parents was really well done.

AS: Yeah, the drop-off and the pickup. That’s a reality that many, many parents know about, right? And in the case of the special, Minjin, actually it’s her grandmother who comes and gets her. We also wanted to show those different types of families also. It’s not always just a nuclear family.

JM: Right. Absolutely. So when you look at “The Day You Begin” and you look at where PBS Kids is at in 2026 and beyond, what do you see as far as the content you wanna present and how “The Day You Begin” represents that? And how do you feel about the state of animation when it comes to what you represent with PBS Kids?

AS: Oh, Jackson, that’s a wonderful question. How much time do we have? (laughs) So let me just take one step back because what happened in the last year or so is that PBS Kids, or PBS in general, suffered a lot of funding cuts, which then led us to focus our pipeline on content that we knew would help with the needs that parents and teachers and caregivers are telling us or that we know. We see reports on where kids are. How can we help those kids more? So instead of trying to do a lot of things, we said, “Let’s focus on school readiness, getting kids ready for school, helping kids that are in school already but that are struggling with some of that confidence, executive function skills, early math, early literacy.” So it sounds like a lot, and it is a lot, but it’s something that PBS Kids can do really well, and we’ve done that already. We had some projects that were already in production. And then this special in particular felt like the perfect example of what we mean when we talk about school readiness.

A lot of the content that we are working on is animation. We love animation. It’s such a beautiful way to show artistry and to show craft, and to have different voices, different looks, different ways to interpret reality. We have a few projects in the next year from now until like mid-next year that we’re very proud of that are coming out. Some of them are specials. Some of them are what we call a multi-platform series where there are games and there are shorts and music videos and episodes. So we feel that we have a strong showing that supports school readiness. And we continue to be very open to talking to creators, to talking to producers, and just figuring out what is the next project that would fulfill a gap in our ecosystem. We’re always thinking about that. We kinda know, but we also don’t know what we don’t know. So if a producer, creator, artist, writer has a story that they want to tell and they just feel like PBS Kids has nothing like this, “Wouldn’t it be great to work with PBS Kids?” We are super happy to work with those, and just bring your specific story, your creativity, your point of view, and we’ll be super open to working with anyone. It’s the public part of public broadcast. So we are really excited about that.

And I know that in general there’s been a lot of concerns, but this has been ongoing concerns for a few years already about the state of the animation industry, so we’re not oblivious to that. We’ve always been a huge contributor to finding new voices and new talents and betting on series for several seasons. So being more steadfast on the promises that we know a series can fulfill when we’ve launched it. It’s harder for us to do that now, but we’ll continue. Our mission has not changed. We continue, and we know that overall the market has been retreating from serving kids… from creating animation specifically for kids. You see that as animation for young adults and adults increases, there’s less and less appetite for content for kids. It just ends up being library or ends up being a rehash of existing IP. We are confident that there’s a lot of new stories out there that deserve to be told.

JM: I completely agree with you. Yes. Celebrate storytelling, artistry, artists, original ideas, and animation. And I’m so glad that you’re doing that at PBS Kids, and you’re doing that through great work here with “The Day You Begin”.