UNF Presents Duval County Teachers 2010 Gladys Prior Awards

Joanna Norris, Assistant Director

Department of Media Relations and Events

(904) 620-2102

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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