Earlier this school year, co-creators sophomore Laasya Poola and junior Olivia Henkel took the initiative to start an American Sign Language (ASL) club at Central.

“When I came back to school [after summer break], I thought it’d be really cool if there actually was a sign language club,” Poola said. “I know at our school we don’t have sign language as a class, and I know a lot of schools in the community do, so I thought if we started a club and there was enough enough people, maybe we could actually try to have ASL as a language in our school.”

The student led club meets every other Wednesday directly after school in Room 128, and every meeting begins with each member “signing in” or finger spelling their name.

Co-sponsor for the club, Alyssa Sprovieri, is a learning behavior specialist at Central and has always had a personal goal to learn ASL. With this club, she hopes that more people will be fluent in sign language and more will learn about the deaf community.

“One of my good friends was very involved in the deaf community in Philadelphia, [where I’m from], and he ended up adopting a deaf son,” Sprovieri said. “He passed away in February, and I didn’t learn [ASL] before he died so [his passing] was my final motivation to do it.”

The second co-sponsor, Jean Long, is a hearing itinerant for Central. At the end of last year she was contacted about starting the sign language club, and years ago, Long learned ASL in order to be able to interact with her deaf nephew.

“When we realized that my little nephew was deaf, my parents and my sisters and I started taking sign language classes so that we’d be able to communicate with him,” Long said.

A normal lesson plan for the club includes 20 new vocabulary words and then practicing creating sentences with the words one week, and then the next meeting they’d review and play games such as Kahoot to help practice conversational skills.

“[The club] is aimed for both hearing and deaf people because I think it’s really important that they have a community together [as] they both have a lot of cultural differences,“ Poola said. “I think sometimes hearing people are a bit ignorant of what deaf people want. [It’s important] for them to come together in one area […] and to be able to have conversations.”

This club is not school sponsored and food is provided for the meetings. Most students in the club are beginners, but the few experienced signers help the club stay up to date with the ever-changing signs.

“Everybody knows that [most members] are at the novice level and that they’re new to this, so there is not this expectation that we are all these wonderfully fluent signers,” Long said. “I just encourage anybody that’s interested to just come by and check out the club.”

The sign language club has the ultimate goal to be able to sign with other more advanced high schools including Hinsdale South at different social events.