News

Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society (PTK) will recognize Dr. Ron Clinton, President, Northeast Texas Community College (TX), with the Shirley B. Gordon Award of Distinction during PTK Catalyst 2024, the Society’s annual convention in Orlando, Fl, April 4-6, 2024. The Shirley B. Gordon Award of Distinction is Phi Theta Kappa’s most prestigious award for community college presidents and is named in honor of the late Dr. Shirley B. Gordon, Phi Theta Kappa’s longest-serving Board of Directors Chair and long-time president of Highline Community College in Washington.

For twelve years running, the scholars of Honors Northeast have premiered previously un-filmed stories of the Texas past. But this year, Honors Northeast, and the NTCC Webb Society have teamed with Herald and Co. Motion Pictures to present a story that has never even been told before. The film follows the research of the Reverend Dan Hoke of Franklin County, and NTCC Presidential Scholar, Luke McCraw. It spotlights a gap in early Texas history. Most students know that Mexican authorities and empresario, Stephen F. Austin advertised early Texas as a Roman Catholic province. What they don’t know is the extent to which Austin, in fact, worked to create a totally secular state. No one of influence encouraged the reemergence of Roman Catholic missions like the Alamo that had expired, or the immigration of priests. At one point the whole area of east Texas had only two priests. Incoming Protestant missionaries, meanwhile, were beaten, imprisoned, and forced to re-emigrate. A “Pine-Tree Curtain” from the Red to the Sabine appeared. Would Texas become something like Revolutionary France, an extreme realization of the so-called Enlightenment?

Prior to conducting business, the Daingerfield-Lone Star ISD school board took time out to recognize another set of champions, this one from West and South elementaries and Daingerfield Junior High.