Sponsors, as promised in the receipts in the mail right now, the forms to add members to your chapters are available here. You may choose to download them in either Microsoft Word document format (20.5 KB) or PDF format (69.0 KB) (Adobe's free reader for PDFs is available here). I've cleaned out the older news from the front page; there should be a couple more updates before the weekend is out (more stuff that Mr. Williams has given me to post).

As the title says, the May issue of the Tennessee Torch is available online. It is in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (free reader available here). You can download the 4,598 KB file by following this link. Thanks again to 2002-2003 Torch Editors Tara Daniel and Daniel Taylor for putting out such a fine Torch.

There are lots of miscellaneous updates today. First, I have updated the Executive Board listing with your officers for this coming year. This also means that the @tjcl.org addresses have all been updated to point to the new officers' addresses. The exceptions are torch@tjcl.org, since Tara and Daniel are still in charge of the May Torch, and historian@tjcl.org, since submissions of pictures of activities at this point should still go to Claire. I have also posted the Best of Show awards listing in the TJCL Convention section (more detailed results to come after I get past the APs). Finally, I have typed up a transcript of the gubernatorial proclamation making Latin Week official in the state of Tennessee.

That's right! According to tradition, on this date in 753 B.C. Romulus founded the soon-to-be-great city of Rome. To coincide with this important date in history, the National Junior Classical League has designated this week (April 20-26) National Latin Week. In addition, the TJCL has been able to obtain a gubernatorial proclamation from Governor Bredesen officially declaring this week as State Latin Week in Tennessee. This is your chance to show some extra JCL spirit and to spread the word about the wonders of the classics.

The March Mini-Torch is now available for your enjoyment! (Yes, it's a bit late; that's my fault, not Tara and Daniel's.) In it, Tara Daniel, Torch Co-Editor, writes about the reasons why one should take Latin. Of course, you don't need the extra encouragement, but she includes some very interesting results from various research studies that you could use to encourage your younger friends to consider Latin for high school. For example, did you know that the mean SAT verbal score for Latin students is a 665, compared to an overall mean of just 506 and a mean for Spanish students of 583, French students 633, and German stduents 625? In the second article, Daniel Taylor, also Torch Co-Editor, writes about the state of spoken Latin (remember Dr. Tunberg from National Convention?) and other issues in the debate over what is classical Latin. I strongly encourage you to check these articles out, as this year's Torch Editors have gone the extra mile to provide us with some general insight while we wait for state convention.

I've been working on a lot of updates to the website, and have just now mass uploaded the new revisions. Because our new servers require files using SSI to be *.shtml, to fix the remnants of the old website (changing *.html files to *.shtml and in the process breaking links) seems not worth the effort. I have instead moved most of the important pages fully to the new format, and removed all pages in the old format. That means a more uniform site, but also the loss of some peripheral content, such as the old convention pages. I will try to migrate those pages as well, but that will take more time than I have at the moment. If you absolutely need that content, you can still root through the old site at http://www.angelfire.com/tn2/tjcl/.

A side effect of getting proper hosting is that I can now set up *@tjcl.org email addresses. Therefore, I have updated the contact information for the Executive Board to reflect the easier-to-remember addresses. Now to contact an officer, you can just send mail to *office*@tjcl.org; e.g., you can send me email through president@tjcl.org.

The final item of this update is that the Forum @ TJCL.org has moved once again, but this time to its final home with the rest of the site. Sadly, the old data cannot be transferred, but I will be able to backup and restore elsewhere this new forum if we ever move again. Because we are hosting the forum in our own webspace, there are now no ads at all in the forum! To check it out and register, go to http://www.tjcl.org/forum/.

That's right! TJCL.org is no longer hosted on Angelfire. Your reading this means that your DNS server has received the new IP address for TJCL.org. (Note that the URL is still http://www.tjcl.org/.) TJCL.org is now hosted on WillowWeb Hosting. However, because of some differences between the Angelfire servers and WillowWeb servers, much of the site may be broken. As this is spring break week for me, I'm going to try to get everything cleaned up by the end of the week. Until then, I apologize for the mess.

I have posted the student registration form (48 KB) for the upcoming state convention. It is in Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP format (although I haven't checked for full compatability with Word 97 yet). I do know that OpenOffice.org/Sun StarOffice 6 can read it as well. For more information, check out the new 2003 TJCL Convention page.