Community comes together and learns sign language in order to communicate with young neighbor

This is what being a good neighbor is all about.

Glenda and Raphael Savitz moved to Newton, Massachusetts, a little over two years ago, and soon welcomed a daughter, Samantha. During her newborn screenings, doctors discovered that Samantha was deaf, and her parents immediately began learning American Sign Language. As Samantha got older, her neighbors would see her using sign language with her parents, and it sparked an idea: What if they learned ASL, too?

An instructor was hired, and soon, 18 neighbors gathered in Lucia Marshall's living room for their first lesson. Since then, they've learned lots of basic words and how to string them into sentences. The neighbors are excited that they can now tell Samantha how much they like her shirt, or how proud they are of her for making a basket in her small basketball hoop. "This child will always be a child of this neighborhood," Terry Nowak told The Boston Globe. "We will all be participants in helping her as she grows. We do that with each other's children. The community is already in place. This is just a new way to express it."

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