HIGH PROFILE: KTHV anchor Dawn Scott gives voice to foster children

If TV careers boiled down to their most embarrassing moment, Dawn Scott's life as a broadcaster would be all about the naked guy.

Hollering through a ski mask, he streaked behind her 14 years ago while she was reporting on a bomb threat for a station in Seattle. To her chagrin, his full frontal and her reaction -- "Oh, my goodness" -- are preserved by internet archives, including one that's sticky with malware. It has had more than a few views, but that is a case of sniffles in the world where things go viral. The only thing it exposes about Scott is her composure.

And a pro she is. During her quarter century on-air, more than a decade of it as prime-time anchor for KTHV-TV, she has reported the national stories in her medium size market, interviewing public figures from first lady Laura Bush to now-freed death row inmate Damien Echols. She has won two regional Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; and the Radio Television Digital News Association gave her an Edward R. Murrow Award for a feature on a man with Tourette's syndrome -- her colleague Ed Buckner.

As the station's Verify reporter, she answers oddball questions posed by viewers without guffawing. She has reassured the multitude they aren't about to die from an electromagnetic pulse and explained that science isn't certain why seeing someone yawn makes you yawn, too.

Although she shares custody 50/50 with her ex-husband and guards the time she spends with their two children, she speaks for charity events, promotes fundraisers, sits on boards for Central Arkansas Women and Children First, Miracle League, Best Buddies, the American Heart Association.

All that service, plus the cozy chatting she does with fans via Facebook Live would be enough to excuse the 46-year-old for being athletic, kinda brainy and far from blond; but she's also something more that her job did not require her to be: a voice for children who need homes.

It began with the job. In 2010, KTHV promised the state Department of Human Services monthly videos about children available for adoption. The concept's not new, Scott notes. Broadcasters at several Arkansas stations have been assigned similar tasks in the four decades since "Wednesday's Child" made Carolyn Long an icon on KARK-TV.

Scott got her first "A Place to Call Home" assignment in April 2011. It unnerved her. She saw herself as a newsy newscaster covering hard news. She remembers being assured, "'We don't know moving ahead with our partnership if you'll continue to do the stories, but we need you to do the story.'"

The story was a girl named Courtney. "I was given a photo of her and a small description, which basically is like, 'She's 10 years old. She loves animals. She likes to be outside.' And I'm thinking, 'What are we going to do here?'"

She felt unprepared, and worried that the girl wouldn't like her or might be bitter, angry.

They shot the segment at the Little Rock Zoo's then-new penguin exhibit. "She was the sweetest, sweetest spirit. And she talked very openly about having been in foster care and how hard it was to be in foster care and how badly she wanted a family. And it broke my heart. It just absolutely broke my heart."

Back in the studio, Scott sat down and wondered at herself. Why had she been so shaken? She was not the story. She edited the tape to put Courtney front and center.

A couple who weren't even looking to adopt saw it, contacted the Division of Children and Family Services and began the process that gave the girl a home.

All Scott had to do was let her speak.

"I think that's what Dawn has done so beautifully, take a child out of oblivion as a number and shown their individuality, their uniqueness, their passion, their desire for a home, and brought it to a broader audience," says Christie Erwin, director of Project Zero, a nonprofit that also works with DHS to publicize adoptable children.

Since 2010, "A Place to Call Home" has profiled 233 children and 132 of them have been adopted. About 5,000 Arkansas children are in foster care, but the number eligible and waiting for adoption has dropped to 375. Scott reported the statistics Dec. 6 during the 30-minute annual special she produces around a party she throws where foster children meet Santa and open gifts from donors she recruits. She knocks herself out, but the need is greater than she is, and greater than her platform on KTHV, she says. Both are "just an instrument."

Erwin sees Scott as a role model for focused storytelling who does not waste her power by promoting herself.

"She tries to fade into the background, so to speak, so the child is front and center, or the children, whichever the case may be. That's what is so critical -- to keep our focus not on people or organizations or ministries or anybody that's advocating, but to keep our focus on the kids," Erwin says. "When we do that, change comes and families are born."

EMPATHY

"I feel like sometimes when I'm with the children, it's almost like they're just forgotten," Scott says. "They're orphaned, forgotten pieces of our society. But they're children and they have a heart and a spirit, and what happened to them is not their fault."

She also feels for the broken adults who have lost them. Her compassion springs, in part, from a relationship she never had.

Her father, Daniel Buss, was a rookie for the Oakland Raiders. He was not OK. Buss and her mother, Cyndy Scott, were both about 20 when she was born in Sioux City, Iowa. It was a brief marriage. Scott doesn't know if his problems were due to head injuries or drugs, but early on Cyndy became a single mom. He was never there. To avoid explanations, Cyndy pretended her daughter's last name was Scott.

Cyndy had the help of her own loving parents and siblings and Buss' mother, an old-fashioned grandma who lived in the country and made everything from scratch.

When Scott was 6, her grandparents Gene and Joyce Scott decided they would move to Texas or Arizona and be ranchers. "Their friends thought they had lost it," Scott says, and so did their kids. But as they drove through the Ozark Mountains on their way to scout properties, they fell in love with Mount Magazine. They bought land along Arkansas 80 at Danville and named it the GJ Ranch.

Cyndy followed them to Arkansas, settling in Little Rock, where her brother, the Rev. Michael Scott, was a Catholic priest. He arranged for "Dawn Scott" to attend Our Lady of the Holy Souls Catholic School.

They had to move around. "My mom had not finished college but she loved design. She worked for bridal shops and she worked in clothing and fashion." Scott remembers a birthday when her cake was served atop packing boxes in a just-rented apartment.

After eight years at Holy Souls, she switched to Hall High School, where teachers used the name on her birth certificate: Dawn Buss. "And I was horrified. It brought up all kinds of upset for me just because I don't even know my dad and that's not my name and ... you know."

Far away in Iowa her father grudgingly agreed to let her name be changed.

THE LAW

Scott's mother remembers her playing anchorwoman while watching TV, but she doesn't. She remembers wanting to be a lawyer.

That was her plan at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. To graduate pre-law, though, she needed a winter internship in 1992, and the law firms only took summer interns. WBBM-TV in Chicago wanted winter interns, and so her adviser suggested she take one and spin it as learning Federal Communications Commission regulations.

"I went to the station and I'm like 'I'm pre-law and I'm interested in learning more about the FCC,' and they were like 'Whatever.' This guy named Howard who ran the assignment desk said, 'Get in here and answer phones if you want to be an intern.'"

It was a wild and crazy newsroom and broadcasting was "golden," she says. "It was shining light in all these dark places." Although she had been accepted to the University of Southern California Law School, she blew off law school to work at WBBM as a research assistant for the assignment desk.

Chicago's a major market and WBBM was not going to put a nobody with no experience on the air. That's not how it works. But co-workers, especially Dawn Stensland, took her aside and taught her. After Stensland shot a standup piece in the field, she'd call Scott over and say, "Now you." They helped her cobble together a little demo reel.

She shopped it around tiny stations in Arkansas and Mississippi, and "oh my God, people were so mean to me. News directors were telling me, 'Why don't you pick another career? You didn't go to law school? What?'"

Deeply discouraged, she let her mom drag her to some event in Sioux City, where she applied at two stations. KCAU-TV took a chance.

Its reporters wrote, shot and edited their own video. She'd hoist the huge camera and drag the big cable through the cornfield in the snow, set up the tripod wrong and then see the camera slowly nosedive while she was trying to record herself trying to remember her report.

Her news director threw his pencil across the room.

But after two years and two months she was weekend anchor.

One day her grandmother called her at work to say her father was dead.

"I didn't really know what to think because I never really knew him," Scott recalls. But the emotions were exhausting. Why had life brought her back to Iowa only to be permanently abandoned?

Today she understands. "What ended up happening was I was able to see and understand why he was not in my life and was actually grateful that it was my mom alone who raised me," she says. "Even though I had had these feelings of abandonment, I did have a parent and I did have a whole lot of love. ...

"As of today I feel no inadequacies. I feel like I've received love and, I mean, blessings beyond what I could have ever, ever have asked for. God or the angels or whatever you believe in placed me here for a reason, took all that experience and made it not for nothing."

She went home to Little Rock in October 1995, and while there applied at KATV and KTHV, which had just been bought by Gannett. KTHV liked her.

GOOD HIRE

When Scott arrived for her first day as a nightside and weekend reporter in December 1995, Anne Jansen Broadwater was lead anchor.

"Even though she was young, she had already worked very hard at her craft, and it was evident that she could handle any situation with ease," Jansen Broadwater says. "We instantly knew she was intelligent, informed, a seeker of knowledge and not afraid of hard work. Then there's her charm and charisma."

When Jansen married Dr. Ralph Broadwater in 1997, she wanted evenings at home, so Scott was promoted to co-anchor at 10 p.m. with Larry Audas. "Very soon after that, it was a matter of months," Scott says, "they decided that they wanted an all-female show at 5. So they put Anne and me together at 5, Anne and Larry at 6 and me and Larry at 10. So I was doing the 5 and 10."

Side by side they sat for almost seven years as Jansen became a mother and Scott met and married anesthesiologist Dr. Scott Jones, then a med student at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

In 2002, the couple moved to Seattle for his residency. She worked as a reporter and fill-in anchor for KIRO-TV (and the streaker ran naked past her one night). As her husband's four years of residency drew to a close, they were plotting where to go next for their careers -- when they learned she was three months pregnant.

Big surprise. Diagnosed with the thyroid disorder Graves disease, she did not expect children. Well, her disorder went away. (Her doctor in Seattle was Fran Broyles, a niece of Frank Broyles.)

"We immediately just decided then, 'OK, we're coming home.' Isn't it funny? And that was not the plan, really. At all. ... But everything that was home was calling me, and that included the station, too. I thought if I'm going to come back I'm going to go where I was. And that's where I've been since. That was November 2006. I showed back up and I was pregnant on air."

So pregnant. Jackson was born Dec. 21. Their daughter, Keene, came two years later.

Like many marriages, after more than a decade, theirs ended in divorce even though they had tried to get along for their children. "Their father is a sweetheart," Scott says. "He's a friend of mine. We share custody, and it's a true share, 50-50, which is incredibly difficult but we just put them as the focus."

CHILDREN FIRST

Dawn and Brad Bailey of Benton didn't catch Scott's segment about 15-year-old Chase when it aired on Thanksgiving 2015. Dawn Bailey was not interested in adopting. They'd already launched two of their three daughters, and with their youngest 12, she was bracing for the teenage years.

Scott had arranged for former Razorback Sunday Adebayo to play basketball with Chase in an "A Place to Call Home " segment that three friends who did not know one another sent to Dawn and to Brad separately via Facebook, saying Chase looked like he belonged with them.

Dawn Bailey doesn't remember seeing Dawn Scott. All she saw was her son, waiting for her.

As of Jan. 10, after 2,310 days in foster care, 11 placements and 24 foster homes, Chase Bailey has parents and three sisters. "I am learning how to be a boy mom," Dawn Bailey giggles. "It's hard. Adoption is hard. But he is so amazing, and he is so -- I mean, he's just precious. He's like any other teenager, and I want to pull my hair out sometimes, and then sometime he just melts my heart."

She's gotten to know Scott, too.

"She doesn't want it to be just the news. She wants to share life with Arkansas and she wants to make a difference. When she lays her head down at night, it's not just about sharing the news -- which is very important -- but it's about making a difference in people's lives."

Jansen Broadwater says, "Her love for the kids she profiles is genuine, and it shows."

That's easy, Scott says: "It's not about them being bad kids or troubled kids or awful kids who've lived through this horrible thing. They are just children. They are our children and they need our help."

High Profile on 12/24/2017