Classy Ensemble
For a language seen mostly in textbooks and heard mostly in church, Latin provided a fairly lively weekend for 79 Butler High School Latin students.
On May 25, those students traveled to Penn State University to compete in the annual Pa. Junior Classical League State Convention. Butler took home the second-place overall trophy, winning 81 awards in the academic, athletic, graphic and creative arts categories. The Butler students even won the overall chapter spirit competition.
Jim Kasparek, Latin teacher at the Butler Intermediate High School, said, “We took second place. We did really, really well, better than ever academically.”
The PAJCL conventions meet every year on the Penn State campus.
From Friday until Sunday, students compete in athletic, academic, and creative arts competitions. These range from track events, to academic tests, to dozens of categories of creative arts projects and performances.
The real driving force, however, behind the weekend of competition, is for Latin students from all over the state to get together and celebrate their shared love of all things classical (Latin, Greek, classical art and culture, etc.).
The Butler Area Junior Classical League, or BAJCL, which is the official name of Butler's Latin club, has been attending these conventions since 2001. This local JCL chapter is the largest in Pennsylvania, with an enrollment of 203 students. As a language, Latin is currently studied by more than 300 students at Butler from 8th through 12th grades.
Patty Hay, a Butler alumna, and now one of the Latin teachers at Butler, is also the PAJCL state chairwoman.
Hay is responsible for organizing the entire weekend. This year's convention ran smoothly thanks to her efforts and those of her co-chairs, Brooke McLane-Higginson from the Ellis School in Pittsburgh, and. Karin Suzadail from Owen J. Roberts High School in Pottstown.
Hay said, “I can speak from the state perspective. We have a parent organization, the American Classical League which is an adult organization for both Latin and Greek. And the National Junior Classical League is for those taking classes in Latin, Greek and the classics.”
She credits Butler High School's strong Latin program to teacher Linda Russell.
“She can create that spark of interest in someone,” said Hay, who said she was one of Russell's students when Hay was a student at Butler High.
“Latin survives in how we teach it,” said Kasparek. “We use a reading-based approach.”
“Latin in such an important language,” said Hay, adding its influence is felt everywhere.
Latin overlaps with medicine, law, government, biology, philosophy, literature, nursing, mathematics, writing, history, botany, pharmacy, geology, and many arts, Hay and Kasparak said.
Kasparak said the study of Latin has been shown to improve student scores on standardized tests, which she credits to Latin students being more logical and observant in their thinking.
Kasparak said, “It's not a dead language. That is, it's not spoken, but students can see it more deeply. Latin is everywhere in our languages, in our names.”
