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.
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.
What's interesting is the district is 57% Asian, according to the Minnesota Department of Education website. The link to the school's site didn't work, so I couldn't see if the bus segregation is as silly as it sounds.
"and now the school district is apologizing."
If it were my kid, an apology would not be enough. They'd see me in court defending a civil rights lawsuit.
You are correct: "read carefully"
The driver determined that the 3 kids were not Hmong students (because they spoke perfect English and didn't look Asian) and (IMHO) would have been taken to the wrong school.
Deliberate race-baiting article...you called it MSF
Did I wake up this morning in an alternate universe?!
"They are going there anyway"........
A Somali arrives in Minneapolis, a new immigrant to the United States. He stops the first person he sees walking down the street and says, "Thank you Mr. American for letting me in this country, giving me housing, food stamps, FREE medical care and free education in my language!"
The passer-by says, "You are mistaken, I am Mexican". The man goes on and encounters another passer-by. "Thank you for having such a beautiful country here in America!"
The person says, "I no American, I Vietnamese."
The new arrival walks further, and the next person he sees he stops, shakes his hand and says, "Thank you for the wonderful America!"
That person puts up his hand and says, "I am from middle East, I am not an American!"
He finally sees a nice lady and asks, "Are you an American?"
She says, "No, I am from Russia!"
Puzzled he asks her, "Where are all the Americans?"
The Russian lady checks her watch and says... "Probably at work!"
The district also discovered the Armstrongs no longer live in the Phalen Lake School boundary because they moved last year.Well..... Well......So even thought the district apologized, if they want to still go to Phalen, they are going to have to get their own ride.
Expensive garbage. The cost of books is outrageous because of all the beautiful, distracting pictures.(I am a photographer.) Also, remember, the family had moved outside the district. You must pay the tax amount to go to another school district. I am wondering how well the foreign students are learning English when our own kids aren't learning English or how to read, or even subtract and divide. But, hey! Algebra comes in real handy in third and fourth grade! Half the problem is the schools, half the problem is the working parents. My son got hit with both, he's very smart(don't we all think our kids are brilliant!), but the odds are against him. I just hope and pray he's as stubborn and hardheaded as his mom.
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