Farmers Branch schools say no to English Only
Yesterday, I was having a Dad day. For those of you with living parents, that is a day that the loss of a parent just really hits home no matter how many years it has been since they died. You can usually predict when they will happen (holidays, birthday’s, anniversary of the deaths) but sometimes one creeps up and just smacks you in the face. There is really no way to explain it if you have living parents because you can imagine the loss but the imagination and reality just don’t meet.
It was brought on by, of all the wierd things, Grey’s Anatomy. One of the characters lost their father and another was talking to him about the loss of a father. T.R. Knight’s character said something along the lines of “I can’t imagine a world without my father in it.” and Sandra Oh’s character replied “Yeah, that never goes away.” That was the end of a rather long and heartwrenching discussion between the two, and while the whole conversation hit me it was those last two lines that made me a bit of a basket case. Such an random television moment that just knocked me off my feet. I suppose being able to affect true emotion with television characters is a mark of good writing and good acting. Or it is just a mark that I am a big wussy and should never watch television. But, regardless, I am back at the computer today and spent the morning looking for good news.
Finding a story that I could say was good news was really hard and this doesn’t completely qualify but Nancy Strickland, one of the schools trustee’s, statement about the schools not playing politics with children’s lives made this worth mentioning as good news.
Dallas Morning News | FB schools have different view of immigrants
FARMERS BRANCH – On a recent Friday afternoon, a kindergarten class of white, black and Latino children stands in a circle, laughing and singing the hokeypokey in Spanish.
American and Mexican flags hang side by side on the wall at Janie Stark Elementary. The class is part of a pilot dual-language program that teaches students half the day in English and half in Spanish.
In many ways, the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district is at odds with the path the city of Farmers Branch is taking with its recent measures targeting illegal immigrants.
The Farmers Branch City Council declared English the official language. But the school district still offers bilingual education – as required by state law – and continues to send mailings and hold parent classes in Spanish and other languages.
City measures could eventually allow police and apartment managers to check people’s immigration status. But the school district emphasizes that any child is welcome, regardless of status, thanks to a 1982 Supreme Court ruling.
“As I told the city manager years ago, what you do in the city is one thing,” said school trustee Nancy Strickland, a former Spanish teacher who has lived in the same house in Farmers Branch since 1965. “We are here to teach children, and that is not a political game for us.”
The morning after the city immigration measures passed, Stark principal Abby McCone received a phone call.
“A little girl called and asked if she could come to school,” she said. “I said, ‘Yes, honey, you better hurry.’ “
The rest of the piece is certainly worth reading. There is more grandstanding by Tim O’Hare but really after this little snippet the story falls out of the good news category and I decided to do a good story today so I won’t comment on that.
Technorati Tags: Farmers Branch, Texas, Tim O’Hare, Carrollton-Farmers Branch school district, Nancy Strickland
Filed under: Farmers Branch, Tim O'Hare, hispanic, illegals, immigrants, immigration, texas, texas politics
