A few weeks ago, the University Interscholastic League released the 2023 UIL Sponsor Excellence Award winners. One of the winners selected was Chapel Hill High School’s very own UIL Academic Coordinator, P. Anthony Williams. The purpose of the award is to highlight the contributions of sponsors of UIL scholastic competition. It was created to identify and recognize outstanding sponsors who assist students in developing and refining their extracurricular talents to the highest degree possible within the educational system while helping them to keep their personal worth separate from their success or failure in competition.

For twelve years running, the scholars of Honors Northeast have premiered previously un-filmed stories oftheTexaspast. Butthisyear,HonorsNortheast,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 eastTexashadonlytwopriests. IncomingProtestant 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?