private donations. (The "Festival 84" spring pledge drive, for example, raised $519,000, an increase of 162 percent over the $198,000 raised in the previous year's "Festival" event.) To aid these efforts, in 1984, the AETN Foundation (now the Arkansas PBS Foundation) was established as an independent endowment trust for the network's public and private fundraising efforts, soliciting and receiving permanent endowment donations to help support the network and commission's operations; it is presided by the eight AETC commissioners and seven at-large elected lay members. The AETN Foundation superseded Friends of AETN (founded in 1976) as its funding trust, restructuring that organization as a volunteer and public relations support entity. AETN also became an early adopter of the fledgling second audio program standard in October 1984, when it entered into a partnership with the Arkansas Division of Services for the Blind to transmit the Arkansas Information Reading Services for the Blind (AIRS) radio reading service on its main SAP subcarrier; the AIRS service provides audio transcriptions of local and national newspapers, magazines and books for blind and visually impaired Arkansans. (The AIRS feed was later made available on the network's DT4 subchannel when AETN began digital broadcasts in April 2004.) Among the programs that Ho developed at AETN was the weekly state news and affairs show Arkansas Week, modeled as a local version of PBS's Washington Week in Review. In 1986, the program received criticism from lawmakers and threats of legislative action by the Assembly's Review and Advise Subcommittee of the Legislative Council against AETN because of two recurring panelists, Arkansas Democrat political reporters John Robert Starr and Meredith Oakley, for their criticism of public officials. State Sen. Knox Nelson (D–Pine Bluff) opined that AETN was to focus on educational content and not politics and expressed concern that it was "becoming a propaganda system that would be used to promote political philosophies." In a memo to the Assembly, Ho responded that Arkansas Week was structured to feature general discussion on the week's state news and would not be a forum for personal attacks on lawmakers or other individuals. (Ho resigned in August 1986 to become executive director of Maryland Public Television.) In October 1992, Ralph Forbes, a former American Nazi Party member and self-described "Christian supremacist" who ran as an independent U.S. House candidate for the state's 3rd congressional district in that year's elections, filed a lawsuit against the AETC in