New Scholarship Memorializes Distinguished Educator

A new scholarship fund at Pfeiffer University has been established to honor the legacy of the late Brenda Poplin Cripliver '68, who enjoyed a distinguished career in teaching after earning a bachelor's degree in Elementary Education from Pfeiffer College.

The Brenda Poplin Cripliver '68 Memorial Endowed Scholarship was created by Pfeiffer alumnus Steve Cripliver '68, Brenda's husband, and several of the Criplivers' friends. It will support scholarships for undergraduate students who have financial need, with preference given to those who are preparing for a career in elementary education.

Brenda Cripliver, who died last year, was born and lived in Concord, N.C. before moving with her family to Pennsylvania when she was in the fifth grade. However, her parents hailed from New London, N.C., where they maintained a home and visited often after the move North; this meant that Cripliver often saw Pfeiffer on drives to and from New London.

She eventually chose to attend Pfeiffer because she saw advantages in its small size and because it removed her from the "snow and freezing weather" she had come to know in Pennsylvania. As she joked in a remembrance she wrote for a Class of 1968 project, she felt like a big fish in a small pond at Pfeiffer.

Cripliver would thrive at Pfeiffer, learning how to teach from professors such as Dr. Phyllis Gore-Houghton, professor emerita of education, and Dr. Lloyd Lowder, former professor of education. She did her student teaching at New London Elementary School, which her parents had attended. Along the way, she learned the importance of striving to be "more creative" in the classroom and "not just to meet the minimum, basic requirements."

This mindset helps explain the success she'd enjoy throughout her 42-year career as a teacher in North Carolina, which began in the Lexington City Public Schools and included stints at Davidson County Community College (now Davidson-Davie Community College) and Davidson Country Day School. When she became one of Lexington's first teachers of kindergarten, which would not be offered universally for all of North Carolina's public school students until 1978, she saw it as an opportunity "to give direction to the creation of a strong new adventure in the state." In practice, this often meant pushing the envelope as when, for example, she'd sit on a rocking chair before a group of young children with a stuffed bear in her hands. If the students seemed afraid of Barry Bear, she'd encourage them to hold it and even take it home with them on the weekends if they promised to keep it warm.

Cripliver made "all kinds of crazy things" available to the children she taught, said Pfeiffer alumnus Dr. Steve Lemons '68, a close friend of the Criplivers since their college days.

Kendall Sharpe, one of Cripliver's friends, witnessed how creative she could be as a teacher when Sharpe and her three-year-old granddaughter visited the Criplivers in their Lake Norman, N.C. retirement home.

"I asked Brenda if she would help get my granddaughter interested in learning," Sharpe said. "She would set up activities that were fun and encouraging for her to learn. Brenda was a true educator and loved children. She never stopped teaching."

Lemons called Cripliver "an early innovator (for) introducing technology and computers into the school classroom."

"At that time they had classroom computer labs and she developed a primary grade program called Writing through Reading, which I think is pretty cool," he said.

Cripliver earned an MA degree in Education from UNC Greensboro and had a distinguished teaching career. She became Lexington's Teacher of the Year and was selected as a state finalist in the Christa McAuliffe Teaching Fellowship Program. She resisted calls from administrators to gain the kinds of certifications that would enable her to join their ranks. "I never wanted to leave the classroom of children," she wrote in the remembrance. "I just could not give up the personal contact with the children and would miss seeing them learn and grow."