$10,000 scholarship powering LCPS educator’s campaign to improve writing instruction

 

A Lenoir County Public Schools administrator who, as a young student, found a creative outlet in her writing is on a mission to infuse middle school classrooms with that same enthusiasm. Her pursuit will be powered in part by the award of a highly selective scholarship for graduate studies.

Christel Carlyle, LCPS’s director of middle grades education, was recently named a winner of a $10,000 Zora Ellis Scholarship from The Delta Kappa Gamma Society International. The honor society for women educators awarded only eight of the scholarships for the 2025-2026 academic year.

“I’m very excited for the opportunity and very grateful,” said Carlyle, who has completed the first year of a three-year program that will earn her a doctorate in education leadership from East Carolina University.

Scholarship recipients must have earned a master’s degree, be enrolled in a recognized doctorate program and have been a Society member for at least three years to qualify for scholarship consideration. Carlyle is a member and first vice president of the Society’s Eta State and Sigma Chapter.

Her career in education spans 25 years, including 15 years as a high school English teacher, but she has been a student of writing since her earliest years in school.

“I remember winning an essay contest when I was in elementary school and I thought that was special,” Carlyle said. “I’ve always thought writing was fun and that it was important to do well.”

Her pursuit of a doctoral degree combines the work she does now, as the curriculum leader for LCPS’s four middle schools, with the work she aspires to do – giving teachers the tools they need to enhance their students’ writing skills and to open students’ eyes to the importance of written communication.

“Writing is often neglected and undervalued in terms of how important it is in the learning process,” Carlyle said. “Research shows that writing has an impact across all content areas. So it’s very important.”

Specifically, her doctoral thesis will explore strategies for leveraging the middle school team concept to increase teacher efficacy for writing instruction. In the meantime, she’ll be doing a lot of writing and researching herself.

“It’s definitely a different style of writing and the research process is arduous,” she said of her advanced studies, “but I am finding the learning is very applicable to the job I’m doing because I’m researching writing instruction.”

A National Board Certified teacher, Carlyle holds a bachelor of science degree in secondary English education and a master of school administration degree from ECU. She taught English at Greene Central and Kinston high schools prior to moving into school administration. She served as an assistant principal at a Pitt County elementary school and at Kinston High before being appointed principal of Southwood Elementary School in 2019. She moved from Southwood into her current senior staff position in 2021.

In addition to her day-to-day duties, Carlyle directs district-wide Science Fair and Science Olympiad competitions and the Quill writing competition, in which student teams from LCPS middle and high schools consistently finish in the top 10 in the state.

She is a member of Delta Kappa Gamma Society, North Carolina Middle School Education, North Carolina Association of School Administrators and the North Carolina Society of Scholastic Activities, for which she serves on the board of directors and was the 2022 nominee for District Administrator of the Year.

Putting the time and effort into the pursuit of a doctorate degree seemed to her the next step in a career devoted to teaching young people and improving instruction.

“It has been an ambition of mine for quite a while,” Carlyle said. “I have aspired to complete a doctoral program for several years and in my current position this extended learning is such a great opportunity for me to be best prepared to lead instruction in middle school.”