As many of you may know, last year during the districts decision to move and pardon certain teachers, the beloved Mr. T was moved from West to a different school. Our new teacher Dennis O’laughlin has been a major downgrade to our ASL skills. We are not learning anything relating to ASL and have not been signing at all with each other. His assignments are all online or on paper and we are losing our ability to actually communicate. Mr. T was passionate about the deaf community and broadening our ability to communicate with them. With O’laughlin we are losing our ability to communicate and actually use the language we wanted to learn. Us students have come together not to kick O’laughlin out, but to reform the ASL program to what it once was or even better

 We understand and acknowledge that this will not be a one and done situation with an easy solution, but we believe that the choice of the district to remove him was detrimental to everything we have and would’ve learned. As the days proceed, ASL students are growing increasingly more frustrated with what we’re learning or more accurately, not learning. We are afraid that we will lose all of our skills in ASL communication by the end of the year. The reputation of the West ASL program and West as a whole will plummet in the eyes of the deaf community and the eyes of the students who have actively been pushing for better learning.