World Languages at Northwest

Northwest High School students are interested in the ability to learn more languages within the school.

The Waukee School Community District has only offered two languages, Spanish and German. Even though taking a World Language class is not necessarily required to graduate high school, most students take the courses because it is immensely helpful when applying for and getting into college. Not to mention that knowing a second language looks good on a resume. However, students are longing to learn new languages.

Sophomore Shelby Dehnke has been learning American Sign Language (ASL) for 2 years. She has found that knowing ASL has made a big difference in her life when interacting with deaf customers at her work. She comes into contact with the deaf community a lot more than people would think. Dehnke explained, “A lot of people use ASL everywhere, and once you start looking for people that use ASL, you’ll actually find a lot of them. For example, at my work, people come in all of the time that are deaf. And just knowing the basics is really good. People get so excited when you are able to communicate with them.” She expressed how ASL would continue in her life, as she wants to be a sign language interpreter. “I don’t know if that’s going to happen anymore though, because I’ve had to put my focus more on Spanish recently,” she said. Putting new language options on the table that students might be drawn to would be beneficial. Dehnke continued, “I thought it was tedious to learn ASL outside of school, even though I wanted to. I just never have any time to learn it, and I have to focus on Spanish because I need it to graduate. I never really wanted to learn Spanish though.” Dehnke hopes that ASL can be integrated into the curriculum somehow. “I hope more languages, including ASL, are added as an option to learn. If people do not want to learn Spanish or German, then why make them?” Dehnke added. 

Sophomore Brinley Heileson agrees with wanting to add more language options to our schools. She feels that students will pick and choose what they want to learn and not apply themselves as much if they are taking a subject that they did not choose or are not interested in. She explained, “I think that if kids only have two language options to choose from, they’re not going to enjoy learning it, or they will just learn what they want to learn because they feel tied down.” She continued, “They need it to graduate, but some people don’t want to learn the languages that are chosen for us.”

Spanish teacher Señora Boley explained that there has been one proposal for a different language class. She explained, “Since I’ve been [teaching], I’m aware of one proposal for sure. Perhaps there have been others, but the proposal was to add French.” Boley continued, “The reason we came up with French is because I think there was some informal polling of students… Many students were saying that they took Spanish because they wanted to learn French, and we didn’t offer it.” Unfortunately, the proposal was rejected. This was not a super recent proposal. “This was probably 5 years ago, if not longer,” Boley said. The reason the proposal was rejected is because it reportedly wasn’t an urgent culture skill that needed to be integrated at the time. “The only thing I remember hearing is that it wasn’t supported as a 21st-century skill to add French. I don’t know if there would be support for a different language or not,” Boley stated.