Court rules 'Talking while Spanish' grounds for expulsion at Kansas school

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

Court rules 'Talking while Spanish' grounds for expulsion at Kansas  
school

U.S. district court judge J. Thomas Marten ruled Friday that an  
English-only school policy at St. Anne Catholic School in Wichita,  
Kansas, violated no laws, and that the offense that has come to be  
called 'talking while Spanish' was grounds for expulsion in the  
private elementary school....

Judge Marten rejected [the plaintiffs'] claims, ruling that it's  
perfectly o.k. to ban Spanish in school. He further found that the  
school's English-only rule had been in place for too short a time to  
create a hostile learning environment, and so it wasn't illegal.

Although the judge didn't seem to consider how expulsion might impact  
the learning environment at St. Anne's, he did chastise the school for  
not anticipating the impact that the English-only rule would have on  
those affected, and for not consulting with students and parents  
before implementing the policy.


... read the rest of this post and the ongoing thread at the Web of  
Language
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage







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