Emerging from juniors Natalia Rodriguez and Angie Lopez, the French Honor Society club is a new project in the works at the school. The idea dates back to Rodriguez’s freshman year when she noticed that the school had the Spanish National Honor society and an Italian club, but not a French one. Coming from a middle school in which the founders had three classes in their foreign language a day, focusing on language, math and humanities, to a school in which they only had one foreign language a day, was quite a change, according to Rodriguez. Thus, the idea of creating a club like this one seemed right. Both Lopez and Rodriguez agree that their mission is to help students of  all grades to learn and perfect their French as well as promote and teach others about francophone culture.

One of the club’s goals is to successfully establish tutoring and active club participation in meaningful service projects aimed at maintaining the well-being of foreign language learning. The girls began drafting and planning for the club at the end of the last school year with the help of their sponsor, French teacher Florence Rouit, whose passion and experience with francophone culture was essential to the creation of the club.

“Rouit is very passionate about it, she’s done it before and she has a lot of faith in what we’ll be able to accomplish,” Lopez said.

They received their official approval to start the club from Activities Director Ana Suarez on the last week of school.

Some of the first plans on the club’s checklist include participating in and promoting the school’s recycling program in collaboration with Gables Earth, and hosting a foreign language classroom clean-up and decoration event for Spanish, French and German classrooms. Aside from the tutoring, they also plan on offering French cultural events that are expected to feature various themes throughout the year, including movie events. They have made their appearance at club fair, presenting a decorated table booth by the pavilion with all of their club information as well as many pictures of francophone culture and monuments.

The French Honor Society club is expected to hold meetings on the first Thursday of each month, with their first meeting being held on October 5th. During this meeting, they hope to introduce attendees and new members to the plans the club has for the year and allow students to join the club’s remind.

Staying consistent with its language honor society status, the club will only be accepting members that are currently enrolled in a French class, however GPA and language level will not play a role in admission. This is a result of the fact that the club is local, hence, in Gables, and not national, meaning that the presidents and sponsor have jurisdiction as to what the requirements are for admission.