KP Education Systems wishes to congratulate an Arizona teacher who uses the Sous Chef™ culinary training resource in her classroom. Rebecca (Becky) Magee has been named High School Chef Educator of the Year by Food Educators Network International (FENI).

Ms. Magee, a teacher at Mesquite High School in Gilbert, AZ, received the honor at the annual FENI Summit, held this year in Orlando. She was recognized for her history of commitment and dedication to her many culinary students.

Ms. Magee has been a culinary instructor in Arizona schools for almost twenty years and has been the lead culinary teacher at Mesquite High School since it opened in 1998.

          The Sous Chef™ is a computer-based education resource designed to teach and enhance culinary skills to secondary, post-secondary, and adult students. It contains more than 250 videos explaining and demonstrating all areas of cooking and food preparation.  It also has 850 text pages and over 1,000 full-color photos, diagrams and illustrations.  All of this material can be viewed on classroom monitors or screen projectors, or it can be accessed by individual students.

“I like the Sous Chef because it reinforces what I teach,” Ms. Magee has been quoted.  She especially appreciates the time and food cost savings she can achieve using the program.

“We have such a diverse group of kids,” she also said. “It helps so much for all the students to see the program.” As in most high schools, the Mesquite program serves a varied group of learners.

The Sous Chef™ can be of special help in working with both advanced students (by giving them access to culinary topics and techniques that might not be applicable for everyone in a class) and struggling students (by offering them repetitive material and demonstrations that might not continue to engage the entire classroom and by audiovisually reinforcing the material they have already been taught).

Ms. Magee and Mesquite High School were one of the earliest adoptors of the Sous Chef™ system, implementing it in 2001. Today more than three hundred schools in the United States are using the Sous Chef and more are purchasing the system every week, says Nai Wang, president of KP Education Systems. KP publishes and distributes the Sous Chef™.    

“Of course, we could not be more pleased that Becky, one of our earliest customers and most vocal advocates, has been recognized for her knowledge, dedication and commitment to culinary arts training,” said Wang. “More important is her proven conviction that culinary arts training is valuable not just as a trade or vocation but as a way for students to grow in self-confidence and personal accomplishment.”

The FENI Chef Educator of the Year award is not the only acknowledgement of Ms. Magee’s accomplishments on a national stage.  In 2005, she was one of twelve winners of the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF) ProStart Teacher Training and Development Awards.