Piper Opens Another School Year With WKPX Still on the Air

WKPX-FM 88.5, the noncommercial educational station licensed to the School Board of Broward County and operated out of Piper High School in Sunrise, returned to its regular fall schedule this week as Piper students arrived back on campus for the 2003-04 school year. The station, which has been on the air since February 1983, opens the year with its usual mix of student-driven programming, BECON-supplied educational content and the alternative-leaning music format it has used for most of the past decade.

The station's 88.5 frequency sits at the lower end of the FM band, in the noncommercial educational reservation that runs from 88.1 to 91.9 MHz. WKPX shares that part of the dial with the South Florida public-radio outlets and the college stations operated by the University of Miami and Florida Atlantic University. The Broward Schools license — held by the school board itself rather than by Piper directly — has been continuous since the original construction permit was granted to the district in the early 1980s.

For Piper specifically, the station is unusual among American public high schools. While most high school broadcast operations consist of morning intercom announcements, a closed-circuit television loop or a low-power Part 15 transmitter, WKPX is a full-power FM station with regional coverage that reaches into central and west Broward and, on a clear day, the eastern edge of the Everglades. The station is part of the district's broader BECON broadcasting operation, which also runs an educational television channel viewable across Broward County.

Back on the Piper campus in central Sunrise, the start-of-year routines this week have been the same ones any large Broward high school runs through. Schedule pickups in the cafeteria. Locker assignments. The first round of pep-rally banners going up in the main hallway. Piper enters the year as one of the larger comprehensive high schools in the district, with an enrollment expected to settle in around 2,400 students once the official 20-day count locks in next month.

WKPX programming for the fall is published on the BECON site and runs on a weekday schedule built around school hours. The station's call letters have been a feature of Piper hallway posters, parent-car stickers and yearbook spreads for two decades, and the 2003-04 school year picks up where the previous one left off — Piper open, school back, 88.5 on the air.