KSLH began broadcasts on April 13, 1950, with receivers set up in 191 city elementary schools around St. Louis, Missouri. All but three of the station's initial 15-minute programs were for grade school students; the exceptions were high school fare on poetry, choral music, and business. KSLH devoted itself almost entirely to instruction for most of its life. By 1953, it broadcast from 9:10 a.m. to 4:15 p.m., matching the school day; it produced about 300 educational programs in a given year, alongside content obtained in the National Association of Educational Broadcasters program exchange. In its first decade of broadcasting, the station produced 2,878 fifteen-minute programs. In addition to NAEB-supplied programs, KSLH educational broadcasts were also supplied by the state of Missouri, the United Nations, and even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and BBC. As a member of the NAEB, KSLH hosted the 1954 In-School Radio Program Writers' Seminar to bolster school-oriented educational radio programs
Around 1988, KSLH began to face uncertainty as to its future due to budget cuts by the St. Louis school board. After its first buyer fell though, a second buyer emerged in October 1995: Community Broadcasting, Inc., the non-profit stations arm of the Bott Radio Network.
From the combined records of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB), held by the University of Maryland and the Wisconsin Historical Society, and compiled as part of the Unlocking the Airwaves project (unlockingtheairwaves.org).
