TEPPIES Teacher Appreciation Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What are the TEPPIES Teacher Appreciation Awards and who runs them?

The TEPPIES Teacher Appreciation Awards are an educator recognition program produced by The Education Partnership, a Pittsburgh nonprofit whose contact address is 281 Corliss Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15220. The program exists to celebrate outstanding educators: teachers, principals and support staff members nominated from TEP partner schools. Its current announcement, titled Get Ready for the Seventh Annual TEPPIES Awards, invites the public to help honor the impact those educators make in students' lives.

Where most Pennsylvania public-vote ballots belong to magazines and newspapers, this one belongs to the organizer itself. The voting page sits on theeducationpartnership.org, the nonprofit's own domain, and the ballot material centers on people rather than businesses. Every finalist's full bio and nomination acceptance speech is published for visitors to read before they choose, which makes the TEPPIES closer to an awards ceremony with a public voting phase than to a commercial popularity list.

The announcement asks nominators to put forward a teacher, principal or support staff member from a partner school and to help honor the impact those educators make. It does not print the individual category titles alongside that call for nominations; confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

Which TEPPIES editions are confirmed and when does the voting window fall?

The Education Partnership fixed the program's starting point in a note on its own news page: Spring 2020 marked the first-ever The Education Partnership Awards. From that first spring the program has kept a yearly rhythm, and the organizer's ballot listings confirm editions in 2025 and 2026. A seventh annual headline fits neatly against a 2020 origin with an unbroken spring sequence.

Dated windows come from the organizer's published materials. For the 2024 cycle, the information packet opened nominations on Monday, March 11, 2024, at 9 am and required every nomination by Friday, March 29, 2024, at 5:00 pm. The same packet then scheduled voting from April 29, 2024, to May 10, 2024. Separately, the announcement page now posted asks that a teacher, principal or support staff member be nominated by March 23 at 5 p.m., and that posted ballot tells readers straight out that voting closes at 5:00 PM on May 19th.

Prize descriptions and the staging of the awards event itself are not spelled out on the announcement page.

How does a supporter cast a vote in the TEPPIES?

The mechanic starts with a visit to the TEPPIES page on theeducationpartnership.org during the open window. The ballot presents the full finalist roster, and each candidate arrives with a complete bio plus a nomination acceptance speech, so a supporter can read why colleagues and families put each educator forward before committing a choice.

Submitting is then a matter of selecting the finalist you back in a category and confirming the vote. The organizer's own rule, stated on its pages for earlier editions, reads: You may only vote once for each award category each day of the voting window. Under that rule, repeated support is built from daily returns rather than from repeated clicks in a sitting, which is why the length of the window matters to any finalist's final number.

Voting is free and requires no payment path of any kind shown on the announcement. Since the ballot lives on an ordinary nonprofit website rather than inside a gated app, a phone browser reaches it just as a desktop does, and the reading-and-submitting sequence stays identical on either device. Supporters who want the fullest picture should read the bios first, because the acceptance speeches often carry the context a bare name cannot.

Where does the TEPPIES ballot sit among Pennsylvania's public-vote contests?

Pennsylvania's public-vote field is dominated by publishers. Berks County Living Magazine runs Best of Berks, Philadelphia Magazine runs Best of Philly, Lehigh Valley Style runs Best of the Lehigh Valley, suburban newspapers run the Bucks County & Chester County Readers' Choice, and the Erie Reader runs Best of Erie. Inside Pittsburgh itself the closest geographic neighbor is Best of the 'Burgh, which competes for many of the same local readers the TEPPIES reach.

The TEPPIES differ from that pack on three axes. First, the host: an education nonprofit staging the vote on its own domain instead of a magazine's contest machinery. Second, the nominee pool: educators at TEP partner schools, not restaurants, shops or service businesses, so the electorate is built from school communities, parents, students and staff. Third, the shape of the ballot: published bios and acceptance speeches for every finalist, giving voters a judged basis for the choice rather than brand recognition alone.

That combination gives western Pennsylvania a spring educator ballot that no media reader poll replicates, and it explains why support campaigns for TEPPIES finalists lean on school networks rather than on broad consumer advertising.

How can a finalist's community grow a TEPPIES vote tally the right way?

Because the organizer caps each supporter at one vote for each award category each day, the strongest legitimate lever in this program is the daily return: a parent or colleague who comes back on every day of the window multiplies a contribution without touching any posted rule. Pair that with distribution. The finalist's bio and acceptance-speech link is the piece of content worth circulating, sent to class families, staff groups and alumni lists where genuine acquaintance with the educator exists.

Calendar discipline matters too. The posted close of 5:00 PM on May 19th ends the window abruptly, and votes arriving after it simply never enter the count. Reminding your network the evening before beats a morning-of scramble. For techniques that generalize to any public ballot, from reminder cadence to message framing, see our votes guide. Nothing here overrides the organizer's statements: whatever The Education Partnership prints on the live page about its rules stands above any tactic listed anywhere else.