ST. PAUL, Minnesota (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. 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.
It turns out the bus route was meant to serve one of the district’s three language academies. Phalen Lake’s academy is for Hmong kids learning English, and the academies all have separate bus routes to keep their students together.
The district decided to begin enforcing the separate routes Monday — but didn’t tell the Armstrong family.
School administrators apologized but didn’t agree to let Armstrong’s children keep riding the bus, as they’d been doing all year.
“It is our responsibility to ensure the safety of these kids and we made a mistake,” said Dayna Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the district. “The kids should have gotten home that day.”
Talk about bureaucratic stupidity.
Children punished for speaking English
I am truly scared to be raising my child in this world. Some days (like today) I can’t wait until someone tries this shit on my family.
ST. PAUL, Minnesota (AP) ? A school bus driver let Rachel Armstrong?s three children board the bus Monday…
i know someone who works at the school, so what i’m saying is the truth-
phalen lake had a program called tlc last year, which was for the hmong kids who had just came to the u.s. from thailand. As part of agreeing to the program, phalen was promised by the district that the students would be able to have transportation to the school (they don’t all live in the attendence area) so that their education could be continued in one place. The language accademy is the follow up program. if the language accademy kids live in phalen’s attendence area, they take the normal school busses, but if they live in other parts of st. paul, they get a special bus just for them.
the district’s policy (that wasn’t being enforced until recently) is that ONLY the language accademy students can get transportation if they live outside of phalen’s attendence area
the principal of phalen lake had told the armstrongs, and about 10 other families at the beginning of the year, that they could ride the bus with the understanding that it wasn’t theirs and that there was no garentee that it would always be availible to them. Now the district has told the bus drivers not to let the non-language accademy kids on. They have 2 options: get their own ride to school or switch to a school in their OWN attendance area. This has nothing to do with race or language.
I live in St Paul and believe me, the property taxes, which fund the school systems, are completely out of control. THis is occuring along with a decrease in public services. I cannot understand why students cannot ride a publicly funded bus to their school if they are on the route. There is absolutely NO EXCUSE that a particular PUBLIC SCHOOL BUS is reserved exclusively for sutdents in a particular program. PUBLIC FUNDS are at issue here. MY TAX DOLLARS. The ridiculous duplicity that the St Paul school districts are evidencing has eroded any confidence that I, as a tax payer, have in the school district adminstrators. I think that the districts should be monitered and ALL of the budgets and decisions into the budget expenditures should be transparent and available to the public without question. Furthermore, what better way to emerse the students in an English language teaching program than to have them interact with English speaking students?