Posted on 01/09/2007 9:06:29 PM PST by Nachum
Imagine sending your kids off to school, but when they get to the bus they are told they can't get on because they speak English.
That's right, English.
It happened to a few children in St. Paul and now the school district is apologizing.
Rachel Armstrong sent her kids to pick up the bus as usual Monday, but after the driver let the kids on, he told them he would not pick them up again. He even said he wouldn't take them home that afternoon.
Armstrong left work early Tuesday, forced to pick up her kids from Phalen Lake Elementary School.
Her twin girls, 10, and her son, 8, were kicked off their regular school bus. They were told by the bus driver the route is for non-English speaking students only.
"I was furious. I was at work and I was just mad." Armstrong said. "I felt like we were being discriminated because we speak English. Just because they speak English, they can't ride the school bus. I mean, this is America, right?"
Administrators at St. Paul Public Schools admit the district made a mistake when it stranded the kids at school Monday.
However, the district points out, that particular bus route serves one of three language academies. The one at Phalen Lake is for Hmong students learning English.
The academies all have separate bus routes to keep its students together.
The district decided to enforce the separate routes beginning Monday, but it did not tell the Armstrong family.
"It is our responsibility to ensure the safety of these kids and we made a mistake. The kids should have gotten home that day," Dayna Kennedy, public relations representative.
The district also discovered the Armstrongs no longer live in the Phalen Lake School boundary because they moved last year.
So even thought the district apologized, if they want to still go to Phalen, they are going to have to get their own ride.
This is where "multiculturalism" is headed, off the deep end. Politics is like a circle, once you go so far left you start going in this extreme direction.
Wait till we have the "no white" drinking fountains, we're headed back towards segregration, and it will be at primarily the hands of the left, just like it was the first time.
Pig-Latin always works for me...;0)
If you love your children you will work to make your representatives stop funding the NEA and teach your children yourself. Otherwise suffer!
JMHO
Interesting the Hmong get their own bus.
Wow. I wonder what would have happened if a kid got thrown off a bus for not knowing English? Paging the ACLU...
What I want to Know! Is what Language are they supposed to be Speaking? St.Paul?....Minnesota......Arabic?
So even thought the district apologized, if they want to still go to Phalen, they are going to have to get their own ride.
Why should the district pay money to pick up kids who don't live in their district?
So kids learning English must not be exposed to English in daily life? Segregating these kids, especially below middle school level will retard their learning of English. I know many Vietnamese emigre families that speak Viet in the home. Their children learn English very quickly in school with, at most, an ESOL teacher for an hour a day. It is my observation that the ESOL is not even necessary for more than a few. Their parents encourage the English and would totally oppose language segregation. They want their children to mix and be Americans. By speaking Viet in the home they avoid giving their children strong accents in their English.
What I want to Know! Is what Language are they supposed to be Speaking? St.Paul?....Minnesota......Arabic?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Good Point,,,Why Does The Child Have To Speak At All ???
I bet somebody gets "Burned" over this crap!!...
Stupid "liberal think". "Oh, we're going to coddle you to the grave so that you never have to learn English, just starch our shirts the way we like you to and make sure our dish is made with the extra wide noodles, ha, ha"./s
The headline is extremely misleading and probably purposefully written to irritate.
They were not "kicked off" for "speaking English".
People really need to read this more closely before getting to excited about it.
Somehow, I picture a liberal headline writer saying to his buddies: "Watch what kind of reaction this one gets from the right wing nut jobs!"
Segregating these kids onto non-English speaking buses is bad enough, they don't have to invent headlines to irritate people. BTW, I think that most of the "right wing nut jobs" here can read and understand exactly what they're reading.
I would not agree with that based on some of the comments I am seeing here.
Which reply are you talking about specifically?
Lawsuit time. It used to be the favorite weapon of the leftscum. Well, what's good for the goose...
So even thought the district apologized, if they want to still go to Phalen, they are going to have to get their own ride.
The cheating out-of-district parents were caught when they complained!
The law of unintended consequences strikes again!
Communist actually. Most are so weak they want gubmint to control them.
I am not going to attack anyone specifically because they have missed something in this article (which is exactly what was intended by the way it was written, imho).
Instead, consider this, from the article:
that particular bus route serves one of three language academies. The one at Phalen Lake is for Hmong students learning English.
Now consider this:
The bus serves kids who are trying to LEARN English. Since these kids already knew English, they were on the wrong bus!
The driver handled it badly, the school district screwed up, yes. But, they were trying to get the non English speaking kids to a school where they could learn English.
That's a very good point, I never would have thought of that. The parents are very aware and intelligent, helping their kids assimilate using that method.
This is absolutely disgusting. Absurd. Insane.
And when you call companies to do business you are asked to press a number in order to hear English! English should be automatically default...and other languages should not be offered.
If you want to have a serious conversation do not talk down to me, Honey.
'This is where "multiculturalism" is headed, off the deep end. Politics is like a circle, once you go so far left you start going in this extreme direction.
Wait till we have the "no white" drinking fountains, we're headed back towards segregration, and it will be at primarily the hands of the left, just like it was the first time.'
~~
IMHO, multi-culturalism is primarily led by womyn. Take a look at the make-up of your typical grade school. If there is a male in the administration, it's probably one or two, but the top few posts are womyn.
The vast majority of teachers are womyn.
Take a look at the texts, the lessons, the projects; males are left out - womyn rule, figuratively and literally.
Yes, the multiculti crowd will indeed steer us all toward the deep end.
You bet the school district made a mistake! What if their mom couldn't have gotten off work to pick them up after school?
Just imagine the outcry if this had been a Hmong kid on an english-speaking-only bus.
Hey, I'm just a "right wing nut-job", lol. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black...
"Pig-Latin always works for me...;0)"
Don't use that when addressing Rosie O'Donuts, her native language is Pig-Latin.
Can't get a date, huh?
Rosie Boo-Koo Dinkey Dau!!! Numba`Ten Tao' !! Boo-Koo too much Sop-Sop!!...
Saint Paul: Either Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew. Maybe some Latin; bit of Egyptian...some Syriac?
I've had the impression for a while now that the Hmong don't seem to be doing as well as the Vietnamese. ?
I thought they spoke Norwegian up there.
http://www.parentsunitednetwork.org/Language_center_causing_a_stir.html
There are about five elementary schools in this area that have opened these "language centers". They are located at the elementary schools, but are a separate classroom or onsite area, apparently. Sorry not to "mail you", but everyone needs to know this info. Tax dollars at work and all that.
That's okay, Houston renamed all of the streets downtown with Vietnamese names in addition to the English names. Must make responding to emergencies and mail delivery "wonderful".
The driver refused to drop off elementary school children back at the point where he/she picked them up? Couldn't that be considered endangerment leaving them there like that?
Another huge factor to me is the obesity epidemic. While I acknowledge that it’s not really an epidemic by most definitions, weight increases seem to heavily affect married women. I’m 34 years old now, and I’ve met countless females who ballooned to MGM proportions after getting hitched. To me, this is deplorable. I knew one who showed me a picture of her when she was 22. She was better looking than most movie stars. Her body was hard and trim and her face was pure allure, but by age 28 she had gained 65 pounds and wore pants that William Perry could have fit into. I’d look at her husband sorrowfully when she talked of having children. The act of conception with her would have required the courage of St. George. No mere oral dose of Viagra would do. It would require hypodermic injections to get old Bumpty into Humpity form.
When the Lord punished us for our seeking to obtain his powers he confounded us by giving us a diversity of languages at Babel.
If the route was for Hmong kids who are learning English, then having them with English speakers on the ride home would only help to achieve the goal.
Shoulda coulda woulda.
Looks like they got on the Hmong bus.
I could walk to several Vietnamese restaurants nearby.
I always thought Tuam sounded Vietnamese, but it turns out to be Irish.
I haven't lived in Houston since 1992, but it was my home of record for 25 years.
Everybody seems to have missed the truly abusive situation going on here. Busses are damn'd heavy and children shouldn't be made to pick them up.
Ingenious -- I wouldn't have thought of that. But it's good, in that it keeps the kids sharp in Viet while they're learning good English.
One of the mini-scandals of the NEA/Left's handling of immigration/nonassimilation is that Mexican kids living in the U.S. interior are speaking very bad Spanish, as well as bad/no English. These guys can't do anything right.
A Taiwanese guy I know who wants to retire in China (why, is his business, I guess) is a native Mandarin speaker. His folks weren't Taiwanese but mainlanders from northern China who retreated with the "Gearwheel Chinese" (the Kuomintang) in 1949. He told me ten years ago that he had found that his own command of the four-tone system of Mandarin had grown shaky during his previous 20 years in America (one of his reasons for wanting to reimmerse in Chinese), and that it was a source of considerable concern to him that his teenaged kids' command of Mandarin was pretty bad, especially the tonal system -- but then, Mandarin's a tough language, objectively considered. Nevertheless, he wanted them to be sharp in both American English and Mandarin.
Individuals benefit by being polyglot, but the society suffers when Barneyized Leftist morons try to make it polyglot.
I heard it was actually the Asian merchants who did that, in a flourish of patronization of their American hosts, whom they apparently don't deem their peers, but merely objects of colonization. (Renaming streets, and then cities, is colonizing them.) I understand that this matter is being corrected -- or is supposed to be corrected -- and that the merchants have been informed, rather stiffly, that the street signs they'd added on their own nickel are strictly informal, and that the original names remain the names of those streets for every lawful purpose.
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