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Keep Christ in Christmas!ObituariesEllsworth "Cricket" Dail, Teresa Biedekapp, W.A. "Bill" Daughtry, Luella Worley Scrivener Headlines Princeton's Julie Capps earns National Board certification Progress good on new Princeton school Early News Leader holiday schedule Girls basketball: Lady Eagles top Hobbton at home • Hobbton heartbreaker for Lady Bulldogs Boys basketball: Rosewood takes close win over Midway • Dawgs take on Wildcats Photos Movies I Am Legend
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Green thumb Julie Capps earns board certificationBy Barry Merrill 19 December 2007 — Vocational education used to be the place where students ended up when they didn’t have the interest or drive to go on to secondary education. Today, with changing technologies and the world market for many items, it is increasingly difficult to find a place to work where continuing education won’t be vital in your future. Julie Capps is the horticulture and agri science teacher at Princeton High School. She guesses that only half of her students will go on to at least a two year school, even though she does all she can to encourage them.
In horticulture, she says with growth in the turf grass business, golf courses and parks and recreation, there are great opportunities for rewarding careers. She notes that even fast food restaurants often have landscapers who install and take care of low-maintenance plants around new stores. Builders today often employ landscape architects to plan for a new home, and builders pass along plans to landscape contractors. The business is growing. Even in more traditional agriculture, the business is changing. “It’s so diversified now,” she says. “We’re not just producing, we’re processing, marketing, distributing. And it’s a global market, not just Johnston County.” She noted the careers can be big money as well, particularly in biotechnology. She says the big chemical firms are hiring agriculture education majors away from NC State and Clemson at six figure salaries to work particularly on genetically altering plants. She says a lot of the medicines we use are coming from plant materials. Continuing to learn and grow has been a theme in Julie’s life and career as well. This month she received notification that she had received National Board Certification. She is one of 16 teachers at Princeton School who have earned the prestigious honor, which recognizes superior teaching techniques. Ms. Capps is a 1980 graduate of Princeton High School. She earned her bachelor’s degree in agriculture education in 1984, and with some pushing from her father, Elmer Capps, she continued on and got her master’s at NCSU in 1986. Teaching agriculture is something Julie grew up with. Her father taught agriculture at Southern Wayne in the early 1970’s, and at Princeton until ’88, and finished his teaching career at Smithfield-Selma, retiring in 1999. Her brother, Johnny, also went to State, and he has taught at Beddingfield and now at North Johnston, a source of some family rivalries. While her brother waited to get his master’s degree at night, Julie’s father urged her to go ahead and finish up her master’s, despite her protests about being tired of school. “At the time, there were only four female ag teachers in the state, and he told me that getting my master’s would put me on a level playing field with the men in the profession. I don’t think I would have ever made it if I had tried to go back at night.” She started teaching 21 years ago at Eastern Wayne. In February 2001, she came to Princeton. She and Bryant Wellons sponsor the FFA chapter at Princeton. While the titles of the subjects she teaches are about the same, teaching continues to evolve. She says that with the exposure to entertainment that kids have today, it’s important to entertain, and to educate them sometimes when they are not looking. “I’ve got to figure out the way for them to get it. How well you do as a teacher and how well you relate to your students, it depends on you. Your worth as a teacher is not determined by the lack or presence of degrees. Your experience and reflection on evaluating yourself is what makes you successful. In the real world, you’ve got to be able to perform.” In August of 2006, Julie attended a Career and Tech Ed teacher’s conference in Greensboro when National Board Certification was discussed. Several of her peers encouraged her to take on the challenge. In October, she went to the NC Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Western Carolina University at Cullowhee. She took a seminar on National Board Certification and that gave her a lot of help on what would be expected. “Evaluate, reflect, reflect, reflect. Why is this working? How can you show that you are doing this or that? Show evidence of everything. It makes you think about what you are doing.” She credited two others who have been through the process as helping a lot, fellow teacher Sylvia Myers and assistant principal Michael Price. They read a lot of her submissions and made valuable suggestions. She also had a student, Candace Radford, who is really good at media communications, who put together the videos of her classroom work that was a part of the certification process. She remembers well the relief when she put the package of submitted materials in the mail on March 31st. Not long after, there was a three-hour written exam on a Saturday. Ms. Capps passed the exam on her first try. Many teachers are not so fortunate. Some don’t make it to submission, but there is a hefty incentive. While North Carolina pays the $2,500 to begin the process for the teacher (many states do not), if the teacher does not submit or take the test, the teacher has to pay the state back. There is also a 12% pay increase for teachers getting certification. While the money is good, she says any teacher will become a better teacher from having gone through the process. “It makes you reflect. We got comfortable doing things the way we have always done them.”
When she is not at school, her faith and family dominate her life. Her daughter, Holly, is a ninth grader, and recently got her driving permit. Julie helps with her father’s plant business, but she is back at the greenhouses at school watering plants every day, or taking care of weeds that need to be pulled. She jokes with her daughter about living at school. In free time, she enjoys animals, coming to ball games at the school, and just waving at her kids when they drive past her house. Like her mom, Imogene Capps, she enjoys painting, and she enjoys cross-stitching. Her church, Princeton United Methodist, is important, as she plays piano for morning worship and sings in the choir. She teachers a Sunday School class. She participates in a Bible study, Bible Study Fellowship on Monday nights in Smithfield. “My faith is very important, utmost. The rest does not matter.”
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