The Best Buddies club is planning a new dance called “Back to Best Buddies” this January. The Langley chapter, elementary school chapters and other Best Buddies clubs around the area will be invited to the dance.

“We are trying it out this year and hope this will be successful. We are going to plan for this next month,” said senior Maggie Campion, president of the Best Buddies club.

Best Buddies matches people in “one-on-one friendships.” Students will be paired with a buddy who has an intellectual or developmental disability (IDD), and they will get to know one another and become friends. The club promotes inclusion and equality throughout the school.

Best Buddies matches two students together based on interest surveys filled out by the club members. It isn’t always easy to match the pairs up since the information every Buddy gives is very vague.

“We don’t get to know who they are until we see them,” Campion said.

The meet-and-greet is a new activity that was just added to the Best Buddies program this year.

“The goal of this meeting is to see who naturally likes to talk to each other, sit together and play games together,” Campion said.

Games and snacks also bring the whole club together, who are all expected to come to weekly meetings after school. Outside of school, bowling, the Friendship Walk, cookie decorating and pumpkin painting were some of the activities the Best Buddies club did last year. 

“Our [new] activities just make it bigger and better than last year; this is our goal for this year,” Campion said. “I liked painting the pumpkin, last year. Also, the Best Buddies prom was in April. It was so fun last year, and a whole bunch of people from McLean went,” Campion said.

Since the Best Buddies club has many weekend or evening activities, some difficulties were presented in the communication aspect of the club, which included communication with the Buddies’ parents. 

Parents were not on their emails all the time, so they didn’t communicate with the Best Buddies club that much last year. However, the club began using other ways to communicate, such as Instagram, Remind and Facebook.

“Most parents have full-time jobs. Parents of the Buddies don’t really know when they should pick up or whether or not their children should take the bus. We need to communicate with them better so they know what’s going on. I hope this year will be a lot better,” Campion said.

Although there are difficulties, the Best Buddies club continues to work towards their goals, to send a specific message to the students.

“Everybody is a real person, everybody deserves to be included and everybody deserves the same chance for others to get to know them, no matter what their differences are,” Campion said. 

The longtern goal of the club is to improve society the point where it’s not needed.

“To make the world so inclusive, so inviting, so equitable that we no longer need Best Buddies to promote those things,” Campion said, “The future for this club is we don’t have this club anymore.”