Tanner teacher Adriene Weller is the only Alabama educator named to this year’s James Madison Fellowship list. Courtesy photo

A teacher at Tanner High School is among only 43 recipients nationwide of the James Madison Fellowship, a competitive annual award that endows select educators with funding to further their studies as teachers and scholars of the U.S. Constitution.

Tanner teacher Adriene Weller was the only Alabama educator named to this year’s fellowship list. Each James Madison Fellow was “selected by an independent academic committee in a competition with applicants from each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the nation’s island and trust territories,” according to the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation, which oversees the fellowship program.

Intended to foster civics education for new generations of high school students, James Madison Fellowships are awarded to “promising and distinguished teachers” to “strengthen their knowledge of the origins and development of American constitutional government, and thus to expose the nation’s secondary school students to accurate knowledge of the nation’s Constitutional heritage,” the Foundation explained.

Fellowships may fund up to $24,000 toward each honoree’s program of graduate study leading to a master’s degree, with the requirement that they teach “American history, government, or civics full-time in a secondary school for at least one year for each year of Fellowship support.”

Weller, alongside the rest of this year’s recipients, earned the fellowship “for their scholarly achievements “ as well as their commitment to a graduate studies program that bolsters their understanding of U.S. civics.