Nevada: English-only rule on bus relaxed

[Harold Schiffman]

No Spanish Permitted On The School Bus?? What Do You Think?
by Greta Van Susteren


What do you think ? Read this article and VOTE!!!
English-only rule on bus relaxed



By Timothy Pratt

Sat, Feb 23, 2008 (2 a.m.)

State and national civil liberties advocates have compelled a rural
Nevada school district to roll back a policy prohibiting high school
students from speaking Spanish on the bus.
The guideline was approved at an October school board meeting and
affected about a dozen children from Hispanic families who ride a
school bus more than an hour each way between Dyer, in Esmeralda
County, and Tonopah High School, over the Nye County line. Most of the
Hispanic children are from immigrant families drawn to the area to
work its cattle ranches and alfalfa farms. Robert Aumaugher, Esmeralda
School District superintendent, said his policy was motivated by a
desire to get the Hispanic students to improve their English, although
he also acknowledged that the issue arose from a conflict between a
bus driver and two students who spoke Spanish to each other. The bus
driver did not understand what they were saying and told Aumaugher he
thought it was inappropriate for the students to be speaking Spanish
to each other on the bus.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the policy unconstitutional
and discriminatory. The organization and its national Immigrants'
Rights Project worked with Aumaugher to create a new policy that
encourages students to practice English during the bus trip's first 45
minutes, a required academic period. Students can speak whatever
language they want for the remainder of the ride. "Once the
superintendent was informed that prohibiting students from speaking
Spanish violated their rights, the School District was very willing to
work out a policy that both encourages students to practice their
English skills and allows them to speak their native language," said
Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada.

But beyond the 12 students in a rural county, Thursday's announcement
of the new policy draws attention to how Nevada has been drawn into a
national trend in which communities find themselves seeking ways to
respond to increased immigration. In the absence of fixes to the
federal immigration system, observerssay, those communities
increasingly adopt policies and ordinances on the issue. This was seen
in Pahrump in 2006, as a back-and-forth series of town board meetings
saw the passing and then the repeal of an ordinance that, in its
original version, attempted to legislate the use of flags, the
speaking of languages and the renting of apartments to undocumented
immigrants.

"The context is immigration," Peck said about the Esmeralda County
case. "There are so many newcomers into the United States and as a
result, communities like Esmeralda County increase in diversity. This
presents complexities and challenges that people need to meet."
Nationwide, state lawmakers introduced 1,562 bills involving
immigration last year, according to the National Conference of State
Legislatures, a Washington-based think tank. There were only 550 such
bills the year before.

To Tomas Jimenez, an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation who
studies immigration and assimilation, the policies, ordinances and
laws seen across the nation are "all partially motivated by people who
are disgruntled by a change in culture." Peck notes, however, that
there is a difference between what he calls "the many misguided
ordinances that are sometimes mean-spirited and often unduly
divisive," such as the one in Pahrump, and the situation in Esmeralda
County. The latter, he said, was "more a product of misunderstanding
and miscommunication, and perhaps a little insensitivity."

Peck called the outcome in Esmeralda County a model for elsewhere.
"This is the way communities should be dealing with these things. When
the superintendent and School District were presented with the
problems we had with the policy, they were more than willing to sit
down and work through the issues."

Of course outsiders may be insensitive, or at least unaware, of
certain realities facing a town such as Dyer, 70 miles southwest of
Tonopah.

Like the workforce Aumaugher is dealing with.

If a teacher is absent, there's no substitute, for example. And then
there's the bus driver.

"If the bus driver quits on me," the superintendent said, "we don't
have somebody to drive the bus."

http://gretawire.foxnews.com/2008/02/23/no-spanish-permitted-on-the-school-bus-what-do-you-think/


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