When Judy Karen Brown (the 2004 Alabama Family and Consumer Sciences Teacher of the Year) arrived at Bob Jones High School (BJHS) in Madison, Alabama, in the summer of 1999, she immediately identified a need to build both student and community interests in family and consumer sciences (FACS). She noticed the student and faculty interest in the FACS department was extremely low. While BJHS emphasizes academics, not all BJHS students will attend college, and all need to better develop their life skills--or in Brown's words, "They all need to know how to cook." She wanted to enhance career awareness, expand students' educational opportunities, provide students with valuable life skills and help prepare them to be productive in the community and worldwide workplace. Brown quickly realized the need to support the non-college-and college-bound students through a career technical program designed to expand educational opportunities and to develop skills required in today's homes and workplaces. Brown designed, planned and got City Board of Education approval to build a state-of-the-art culinary laboratory. With aid from several grants she received, the new, fully equipped facility opened in January 2003. In the spring of 2004, BJHS culinary students entered their first-ever state competition for culinary arts. One 2004 BJHS graduate has already received a large scholarship from Johnson & Wales, and a former BJHS culinary student will have several recipes published in the spring 2004 Johnson & Wales magazine. Since then, the Culinary Arts Academy has become the most popular class at BJHS, with more than 700 students registering for the class in the 2003-2004 school year. Brown implements career awareness-job skill training by using unique hands-on lesson plans involving team teaching with biology, physical education, Spanish, history, and computer science teachers and classes.