By Lily Amback / News and Opinion Editor and Lydia Styf / Staff writer
The week before school started, the only ASL teacher, Haley Padgett, quit for undisclosed personal reasons.
However, there is an ever growing need for ASL teachers not just in New Palestine, but around the world.
According to the World Health Organization website, “Over 5% of the world’s population…require rehabilitation to address their disabling hearing loss (including 34 million children). It is estimated that by 2050 over 700 million people…will have disabling hearing loss.”
The statistics show that there will be an increase of deaf or hard or hearing people by the year 2050, making the need for ASL classes only continue to rise.
However, the teacher shortage continues to strike schools across the country, making phasing out ASL a possibility in the near future.
“There’s a teaching shortage across the country in all subjects, but in the world languages, and especially in ASL, there are just not that many candidates. The job has been open now for two weeks and we have zero applications. Really the only…avenues we have are to find a teacher, continue to do it online or kind of phase out ASL,” principal James Voelz said.
Last year, the school avoided this path when they lucked out by finding Padgett before the second semester of school. However, before Padgett was found, the school had already set up an online learning program called Indiana Online to teach ASL students virtually.
This year, Voelz hopes to take a similar route. The school is currently working with Indiana Online to set up another online classroom for the ASL students.
Indiana Online offers semester classes, so if the school does find another ASL teacher, it will have to wait to start teaching until the second semester of school.
Until the school can get Indiana Online up and running, the classroom will be used as a study hall, and some of the students are not happy about it.
“I really want to be learning in school, not just having study time,” freshman Emilee Neff said.
Neff was expecting there to be an ASL teacher and was disappointed to find out that there wouldn’t be one.
Other upperclassmen who have experienced this before are also disappointed and frustrated for having to repeat this process.
One upperclassman, junior Kendall Butler, didn’t like the orientation of classes last year, claiming them to be boring and uneducational.
“They (ASL classes) all kind of start off the same and then slowly they try to make it better, but it just gets worse every time,” Butler said. “They’re trying to get us onto online classes right now, but the last time we did it, no one learned anything.”
However, Voelz is thankful for everyone’s patience.
“I just appreciate the patience of the students and knowing that it’s not a great situation right now and they were definitely looking forward to taking ASL with an active, live person teaching them,” Voelz said. “Them (students) being able to adjust…once again shows what an incredible student body we have and how good our kids are.”
