On June 13, Purnell won the Papermill Playhouse Rising Star Award for Excellence in High School Musicals in the area of Educational Impact. This award recognizes those schools which successfully connect the spring musical to the curriculum and utilize the musical to meet NJ State Department of Education Core Curriculum Content Standards for Visual and Performing Arts for its participants and the greater school population. Curriculum connections must be tangible with a well-documented outcome. 

In a pool of about 30, Purnell was among the 8 nominated schools, and then was one of the 3 schools to actually receive the award. In receiving the award, Performing Arts Chair and play director Leslie Patient said, "I want to thank the Papermill organizers for recognizing small schools along with the big. Our whole school is 115 students which for some of you schools out there is your cast size. We do our musical in a special project period that lasts only seventeen and a half days. We work with our students for 12 hours a day every day during those days, so I guess you could say the arts are fully integrated into the curriculum, it IS the curriculum during that time. I have to take some time to thank my fellow directors who work with me during this intense period for our students: Jamee Guerra, Cleo Mack, Heather Clarkson and Peter Pasterczyk. And I also want to thank our Administration and Board for continuing to see the value of arts in our school, especially in continuing to support this project period known as Project Exploration."