Henson

TVPPA Education & Training Director Kim Culpepper has announced that 10 new instructors will start work in 2018.

Among them is former TVPPA Chairman Wayne Henson, who’s set to teach classes in the Advanced Certified Power Executive certificate program.

Privott Stroman of CDE Lightband (Clarksville, TN), Marlin Williams, manager of Member Services at North East Mississippi EPA, Oxford, MS, and newly retired TVA executive Teresa Ashworth are also scheduled to join Henson on the business-development side. On the technical side, Culpepper is set to welcome Shawn Blomgren of Huntsville, AL, Utilities; Craig Hickey of Oak Ridge, TN, DE; Tommy Sullivan of Starkville, MS, Utilities, Jackson, TN, EA’s Russell Gibson; Randy Meredith of Nolin RECC, Elizabethtown, KY and TVA’s Jeremy Swafford.

“I’m very pleased to have these folks join us,” Culpepper said. “Our job at TVPPA Education and Training is to do whatever we can, every day, to improve, so that we might serve our members better.

“Adding these folks, on both the business-development and technical sides, makes us better,” Culpepper added.

Henson retired in January 2017 from the general manager’s job at East Mississippi EPA, Meridian, MS. He served as TVPPA’s chairman from mid-2013 to mid-2015 and received the Richard C. Crawford Distinguished Service Award at the 2015 Annual Conference.

“Wayne was always a tremendous leader, with an uncanny ability to foresee coming industry changes before most other people,” Culpepper said.

As the new instructors take their places on the TVPPA teaching staff, three other instructors – Tish Erdmann, P.C. Gordon and Wade Johnson – are retiring.

Gordon began his run with TVPPA in the early 2000s, working alongside the late John Marse, among others. Culpepper said Gordon’s “contributions to our industry can be neither measured nor surpassed.” Johnson wrote books and taught executive-leadership courses based his experience in the U.S. Navy.

Erdmann has more than 40 years in human resources/organizational development, including the past 17 with TVPPA. She earned her doctorate in Human Resource Development from Vanderbilt University and developed TVPPA’s first ethics training. She also crafted TVPPA’s Red Flags Compliance program in 2003, when the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions (FACT) Act became federal law.