WKPX Keeps Sunrise’s Student-Radio Reputation Alive

WKPX-FM 88.5 returned to its fall schedule this month as Piper High School in Sunrise opened the 2005-06 school year, continuing a campus broadcast operation that has run continuously since February 1983 under a license held by the School Board of Broward County. The station, run from a studio at Piper, remains one of a small number of full-power noncommercial FM stations in the United States associated with a single public high school.

WKPX broadcasts at 88.5 megahertz from a transmitter site within the district's licensed coverage area, with a signal that reaches across central and west Broward and, depending on conditions, into adjacent parts of Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. The station's noncommercial educational license places it in the 88.1-91.9 MHz reservation alongside South Florida's public-radio outlets and the college stations operated by the University of Miami and Florida Atlantic University.

The station's programming this school year continues the established model: a mix of student-produced shows, BECON-supplied content from the district's broader Broward Education Communications Network operation, and music programming that has historically leaned alternative and modern rock. WKPX participates in the district's broadcasting curriculum and serves as the practical hands-on environment for students enrolled in radio production courses at Piper.

Broward's broadcasting program, which spans WKPX and BECON's television operation on the cable system, is among the more developed school-district broadcasting programs in the United States. Most American school districts run morning-announcement systems or in-house closed-circuit television; only a handful operate full-power FM stations with licensed signals reaching tens or hundreds of thousands of potential listeners. The Broward operation has been in place since the early 1980s and has continued through several technology generations of the underlying broadcast equipment.

For Piper students this year, the station continues to function as both a curricular resource for the broadcasting program and a campus identity marker. Hallway posters, parent-car decals and the WKPX call letters in school print materials remain part of the school's public-facing presentation, and the station's on-air schedule for fall 2005 is published on the BECON site.