NITRO, W.Va. — A Nitro High School teacher is joining the horde of 80 teachers in West Virginia to receive a national educators award of a lifetime.
Students and staff gathered for an all-school assembly at Nitro High School Tuesday, with state Superintendent Michele Blatt on hand, as math and engineering teacher Adam Wolfe was presented with a Milken Educator Award.
Along with the award, Wolfe received an unrestricted $25,000 cash prize as well as national recognition for his exceptional work in the teaching field.
Like all Milken recipients, Wolfe was unaware that he was being sought out as a candidate for the award.
He said on MetroNews ‘Talkline’ Tuesday that he could really only feel one thing when he first found out.
“Shock, and yeah, I mean, mostly shock,” Wolfe said.
He is West Virginia’s sole Milken Award recipient for the 2024-25 school year.
A former engineer, Wolfe provides hands-on projects to his students that connect classroom lessons to real-world applications.
He said he feels he was simply just called to teach.
“I have a degree in mechanical engineering and in structural engineering, so I kind of played around in two different fields in engineering trying to figure out what suited my desires most I suppose, and I actually enjoyed most of those jobs, but something didn’t feel quite as fulfilling as I felt it had needed to be,” he said.
Wolfe teaches an upper-level geometry class and four pre-engineering courses through the school’s involvement in Project Lead the Way (PLTW), a nonprofit organization that provides STEM curriculum for middle and high school students.
He also sets his students up to collaborate with local organizations and government agencies to apply their classroom knowledge through networking and community projects.
Wolfe said it’s all about meeting his students where they are and engaging them.
“As you know, they don’t have a lot of the same constraints that adults have when they’re trying to raise a family and things, so they can like Google things and look up videos on YouTube, and my goal is to try to give them projects and things that will make them want to do that on their free time,” said Wolfe.
He said one of the projects he had his students take on a couple of years ago involved nearby Nitro Elementary School.
Wolfe said they had found out that the elementary school wanted to get flashing school zone lights for the street in front of the school and he thought that was something his students in the engineering program could help with.
“We ended up doing all of the design work, looking at Department of Transportation codes and figuring out where these signs needed to go, and then they did calculations figuring out how deep the foundations of those posts needed to be based on the wind-load on the signs,” he said.
Wolfe said he and his students then went out on a very cold day and poured concrete into the foundation to set up the signs.
Often hailed “the Oscars of Teaching,” Wolfe joins a national network of over 3,000 Milken Award recipients spanning across a nearly 40-year history as the nation’s preeminent teacher-recognition program. He is the 80th Milken Educator Award recipient in West Virginia. 
“Mr. Wolfe is a phenomenal educator who embraces collaboration, innovation and compassion inside and outside of the classroom,” said Superintendent Blatt. “His students and community are enriched by his dedication, and he fully embodies the values of the Milken Family Foundation. We are proud to recognize him as a part of West Virginia’s strong Milken tradition.”
More than $75 million in individual prizes are given in Milken Awards and over $145 million has been invested in the Milken Educator Award national network overall.