Thursday, January 11, 2007

Kicked Off the Schoolbus for Speaking English

Here’s a one those you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up stories from this morning’s Strib. A real coffee-snorter:

Phalen Lake Elementary SchoolST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — A school bus driver let Rachel Armstrong’s three children board the bus Monday morning, but he warned them that he wouldn’t give them a ride home that afternoon, nor could they ever ride his route again.

The problem: Armstrong’s 10-year-old twin girls and 8-year-old son speak English. According to their mother, the driver told them the route had been designated for non-English speakers only.

Armstrong said Wednesday that she got a call from a worried daughter who didn’t know how she was going to get home. “She thought they had done something wrong,’’ she said.

So a furious Armstrong had to leave work early to pick up her stranded kids from Phalen Lake Elementary School.
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Can you imagine what would have happened if the kids had been kept off the bus because they spoke Spanish, or Urdu, or Swahili? You wouldn’t be hearing about it from this little backwater of the anti-PC blogosphere — no, it would be the top-of-the hour headline report on all the networks and in the newspapers. Al Sharpton would have booked a whole floor of the St. Paul Sheraton by now. NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!

But white English-speaking kids — aah, who cares about them? They’re probably Christianists, too…

I used to work in the Public Officials and Professional Liability sector of the insurance industry. I’ll bet you that the liability premium for the St. Paul Unified School District is going up big time when their next renewal comes around.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Baron, I'm going to have to call you out that story as unlikely. Yes, this is St. Paul and crazy stuff has happened in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area before. No, I don't live there, so I really don't know what it's like. I just find something like this too outrageous to be true.