One club is dying a slow death at Hershey High.

German Club is one of Hershey High School’s many after-school clubs offered to students. Mimi Collins, German and civics teacher, is the advisor for the club. The start of the 2018/2019 school year will be Collins 25th year teaching German at Hershey High School.

German Club has 25 members. Towards the beginning of the year they used to meet on a more consistent monthly rate. As the year has gone on their meetings have become more spread out. They did however make sure to celebrate German Day in mid- April and are going for a German dinner at the beginning of this month.

Unfortunately German Club will begin to rapidly decline in the upcoming year unless a unlikely change is made.

“I think that the German Club will not exist after there are no more German classes offered academically,” said Collins

This is due to the German department dwindling to a close due to German not being offered as a class  to the incoming classes. As Collin states this decrease in foreign language options has began to occur “Since a former principal didn’t want the program to continue though, it has been decreasing ever since. “

Nancy Chango is an alumni of Hershey high school and substitute teacher often in the foreign language department due to her impressive background of knowledge in English, Spanish, French, and Italian. While she was in high school Hershey prided themselves on the variety of foreign languages offered.

Although HHS still does have foreign language options such as Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic it isn’t the same learning experience as being in a classroom.

Chango said, “I have substituted the online classes before, its all of the students taking the different languages working online.”

The foreign language department as a whole is getting worse and worse when it comes to diversity. The french department has gone down to two teachers while the spanish department has five. As new classes come up the numbers of spanish speaking students go up.

Chango said, “Yes, Spanish is important to go into many different job fields but Spanish and English aren’t the only languages spoken as so many students are learning spanish as a second language.”

Even Collins said the diversity in the foreign language department has decreased.

“Oh my gosh, my entire schedule was German, all day long,” said Collins, “ The program built up so that we had to have another teacher over here at the high school to teach all of the classes.”

Collins luckily is also qualified to teach civics at our school so as the German language students begin to disappear she will still be employed at Hershey High.

“MI think students should have many choices at HHS especially in foreign languages,” said Collins, “ I am very sad to see German phase out but there’s not much I can do about it.On a positive note, I really enjoy teaching Civics and I am happy to have that opportunity.”