By: Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director
Leadership has been an intrinsic aspect of honors education not only as it benefits the recipient, but the whole honors experience. Students can lead in classroom erudition, elevating the vocabulary, and engagement of a learning community. They can lead in scholarship, emboldening their peers, and promoting the reputation of NTCC. Finally, they can lead in collective activities that provide services for the community and/or accolades for the larger group. During her first summer in honors and first semester in an honors seminar this fall, Sky Bass earned the 2026 Dr. Charles B. Florio Award, for her leadership in all three venues.
Bass was already by last spring semester an active member of Student Government at NTCC as well as the Phi Theta Kappa chapter, Alpha Mu Chi. By the summer she was clearly the most active component of Alpha Mu Chi, attending several PTK conferences, and in the fall she became NTCC’s chapter president. Amid such work, she was the first student to sign on for the honors research trip to Laredo last May. It was the longest such research trip in the program’s history—five days--and Bass not only contributed to this effort which led to the coming film on Jovita Idar, she found another topic that could work for her coming fall seminar. That topic has become the Enron story in relation to other “fraudporations.” Later in the summer, Bass helped organize the honors film effort and played the role of Jovita Idar’s mother, also named Jovita.
At the start of the fall semester, Bass won the Northeast Texas Image Contest with her photograph of a purplish afterglow in Franklin County during a lightning storm. Almost like some photographic El Greco, she snapped the picture just as lightning lit up the sky. Her fourth-place poem, “Breath, Let’s escape,” won $100 and appeared as a calligram, discussing what it was shaped like—a dragon. In her first full semester in honors, Bass has matriculated in both honors seminars. In Texas history, she is the current leader in conceptualization, an enterprise that represents a willingness to engage in “big-idea” thought as well as a kind of scholarly poetry.
Dr. Andrew Yox, Honors Director notes, that “Sky Bass embodies the positive group spirit that has allowed our college to attain many memorable group awards in recent years, not only in relation to other colleges, but also, universities. I am very excited about her research, her capacity to network, and promote group achievements.”
Anonymous donors have supplied most of the $200 yearly outlays for the leadership award in Honors Northeast. The award recognizes the initiatives of Dr. Charles Florio, who served as President of NTCC for thirteen years, from 1995 to 2008. One of the attainments of his tenure was the establishment of the college’s award-winning honors program. Right up until his death in June of 2025, Florio remained a stalwart donor of Honors Northeast, welcoming students to his home by the Fort Worth Country Club.