UNF Presents Duval County Teachers 2010 Gladys Prior Awards
Four Duval County
Public School teachers were recognized
today as winners of the 2010 Gladys Prior Awards for Career
Teaching Excellence, administered by the
University
of North Florida’s College of Education
and Human Services. The teachers will each receive $15,000.
The Gladys Prior Awards for Career
Teaching Excellence—one of the largest teacher awards in the
nation—were established in 1998 by Gilchrist Berg, founder and
president of Water Street Capital, a
Jacksonville
investment firm. He has given 52 teachers more than $600,000 in
honor of Gladys Prior, his fourth-grade teacher at
Ortega
Elementary School.
For the first time in the 13-year
history of the awards, one winner, Shannon Wine, is a UNF
graduate who interned and taught in one of the award-winning
UNF/Duval County Urban Professional Development School (UPDS).
She is also one of the five finalists for Duval Teacher of the
Year. Wine began her teaching career at Woodland Acres UPDS and
later left to teach at other schools. One morning changed her
life and sent her back to where she began.
Early Easter morning in 2006,
13-year-old Radarius (RJ) Jackson was shot and killed by
mistake. The shooter was after his older brother. RJ had been in
Wine’s class for students with learning disabilities for three
years. When he died, she was teaching in Pensacola.
She immediately drove to
Jacksonville
to comfort RJ’s mother at the funeral home visitation and the
service the next day.
Wine was devastated. One of her
favorite students was dead. Because of RJ, she returned to
Woodland Acres to teach. It’s where she belonged, teaching urban
children and keeping them safe.
In the past after three years of
teaching in urban schools, teachers often transferred to
suburban schools, leaving inexperienced teachers with the most
challenging students. The UNF/Duval County UPDS partnership is
changing that. By carefully preparing teachers to educate urban
students, many UNF graduates remain in those schools, increasing
achievement and creating more stable learning communities.
Wine chooses to teach urban children.
She shares her commitment with UNF faculty who prepare teachers
at Woodland Acres in on-site literacy methods courses. She has
modeled her excellent teaching for hundreds of UNF pre-service
teachers over the last 13 years. Wine also shares her expertise
with 50 career changers who are teaching or wish to teach
kindergarten through high school.
In addition to Wine, three other
teachers were recognized today: Barbara Green, Alden Road Exceptional Student
Center; Timothy Allen, Fletcher High School;
and Kathleen Poe,
Fletcher
Middle School.
Barbara Green, a 35-year veteran,
teaches adolescents with disabilities at
Alden
Road
Exceptional
Student
Center. Green’s paraprofessional and
students nominated her, citing her tireless efforts to involve
her students in the community. Business partners provide funding
for school materials and special events such as a river boat
cruise after studying about the St. Johns
River. Each year she takes her students on an
overnight camping trip with the Boy Scouts.
She is passionate about teaching her
students to be responsible and to believe in themselves. A
former student said, “I never came to school and everyone
thought I would be dead soon. Ms. Green told me I could turn my
life around. The first thing she did was get me off drugs and
out of a gang. I had perfect attendance and made A/B honor roll.
It wasn’t easy but Ms. Green believed I could do it… I speak for
hundreds of students in Jacksonville who think Ms.
Green saved their lives…”
Allen teaches chemistry and computer
science at Fletcher High. A teacher for 30 years, he inspired a
UNF professor to be a science teacher. “As a student in his
class, I saw that teaching was an active and dynamic, happy
event. Allen made chemistry understandable, taking abstract
complicated ideas and turning them into stories like the Happy
Atom Hotel.”
Poe, a science teacher at Fletcher
Middle, has inspired students to love science for 39 years. She
lives her love of science by linking learning to the lives of
her students by creating a campus garden, building a pond,
planting trees, recycling, teaming with an art teacher to do a
mural of marine life and other projects.
She is a National Board Certified
Teacher, a teacher liaison for the Space Foundation and a 2077
Princeton Scholar, where she studied art history and created a
science unit linking impressionist art works to the weather.
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