Vaneane Baynssaja is the 2024-25 Texas Heritage National Bank Scholar of Honors Northeast and the student representative of the Great Plains Honors Council. This past summer she won the prestigious $1,000 Yolando Romero Award of Phi Theta Kappa in Texas. In March of 2024 at College Station, she won a third-in-the-state Caldwell Award for her essay on this topic. Recently she has won, in addition, a Portia Gordon Award of the East Texas Historical Association (ETHA) for this work. She was a spring of 2024 winner of the Eckman Award for her outstanding erudition in honors course work. Bayna was a top 2023 graduate of Mount Pleasant High School (MPHS).
Stephanie Hernandez was a top graduate of Mount Pleasant High School in 2024. For three years in a row, she went to state for art competitions. She was a member of the National Honor Society, the National Technical Honor Society, and the Texas Public Safety Association. She participated in UIL journalism and social studies. Recently, at NTCC, she presented he work on Tejano murals at the meeting of the Walter Prescott Webb Association in San Antonio. She is a 2024 winner of the Cunningham Conceptualization Contest.
Alison Majors is the James and Elizabeth Whatley Scholar of Honors Northeast and a recent, Leaders of Promise winner. Majors’ work, “¡Vete de Tejas!”—recently won a Portia Gordon Award of the ETHA. She has featured this work in College Station, Stillwater, and the Mount Pleasant Library. Along with Skylar Hodson, Alison is the co-president of the Honors Student Council. She acts in the current film project of Honors Northeast as Lady Bird Johnson. Majors is a graduate of MPHS.
Isabel Tresidder was homeschooled, and her family is from South Africa. She accepted an invitation last summer to work at the LBJ presidential library in Austin, and then wrote much of the script of the current film on oil and politics. She placed second in the 2024 Northeast Texas Poetry Contest with a work about feral hogs. She presented work which she has performed on Lyndon Johnson at the fall 2024 meeting of the Walter Prescott Webb Society in San Antonio, and recently won the Cunningham Conceptualization Contest for her facility with scholarly poetry. She is engaged this semester in an independent study course with Dr. McAllister on parasites in rodents.
Mary-Faith Wilson is the Gladys Winkle Scholar of Honors Northeast. In the spring of 2024 she won a first-place award in the Red River Symposium for her work on Alzheimer’s patients and music. In September, she chaired the NTCC panel on entrenched problems in modern Texas history at the ETHS which won the Portia Gordon Award. She is known as a preeminent writing tutor on campus, and has participated broadly in the English Club, Sigma Kappa Delta, and NTCC’s literary magazine, Lagniappe. Wilson has won both a Texas Star Award and a Leader of Promise. She was homeschooled and is from Gilmer.
