Alyce S. Culpepper

Alyce S. Culpepper, the 1986 Dow Jones National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year, has taught in Florida for the past 35 years. During that time she has advised award-winning broadcast productions, newspapers, yearbooks and literary magazines.

She recently received the Pioneer Award from the National Scholastic Press Association and the Gold Key Award from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association for her achievements with high school journalists. Selected as Broward County's 1988 Teacher of the Year, she went on to become the South Florida Region Teacher of the Year. She is included in Who's Who Among America's Teachers.

She spent three years at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, where she taught Public Relations, News Writing and Reporting, Writing for the Electronic Media, Advertising Writing and Design and Introduction to Journalism. When she was advisor of the college newspaper, The Pulse, the paper was name the Most Improved Private University paper by Florida Leader magazine..

In 2002 she returned to her roots at South Plantation High School as a Curriculum Specialist and Public Relations director responsible for the parent and staff newsletters, parent volunteers, partnerships, student and staff recognition, adult mentors, and all media relations including press releases, video presentations and special events. Both the National School Public Relations Association and the Sunshine School Public Relations Association each awarded SPHS with two awards in 2002 for her media work.

Culpepper, a nationally certified Master Journalism Educator, is the former Florida Director for the Journalism Education Association. She won JEA's first Professional Contribution Prize for Innovative Teaching/Advising for this material.

In 1990 she founded the Student News Bureau at the Instructional Television Center for the Broward County Public Schools. For seven years, under her guidance, students at 23 school produced two television series, Broward Teen News and Profiles: African-Americans, and teen specials all of which were aired to the more than one million viewers on all the cable systems in Broward as well as to the 200 schools and centers via the district's system. BTN students were selected by Turner Broadcasting to produce the pilot for the CNN NEWSROOM School Video Program.

In 1997 she established the Culpepper Journalism Foundation which awards fellowships to high school students to attend summer institutes at universities and then return to their schools to teach their staffers what they learned during the summer programs.

Culpepper is a published author and photographer whose work has appeared in the Florida Journal of the Teachers of English, C:JET, F. S. P. A. Today, Grassroots Motorsports, and Torque of the Town. She also created and performed in a marketing video for Walsworth Publishing Company.