A highly awarded classroom teacher, he received an Ashland Teacher Achievement Award (1996), a Memphis Rotary Club Rotary Award for Teacher Excellence, and was the first elementary music teacher to be honored at the Disney American Teacher Awards in Los Angeles in 1998. As a college teacher, he has been named the 2004 Hillsborough County Elementary Music Educator of the Year (Tampa, Florida), inducted into the Carl Lampert Music Hall of Fame at the University of Kentucky as a distinguished alumnus, and is the Florida Music Educator Association's 2006 Collegiate Music Educator of the Year.