Monday, December 12, 2005

Kansas City student suspended for speaking Spanish

Contributed by Dennis Kim-Prieto. A Kansas City high-school student was suspended from school for 1 1/2 days for speaking with another student in Spanish. Though the official who made the decision will not comment, the school district has officially rescinded the punishment and has stated that speaking Spanish is not an offense that merits suspension. (WAPO)
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5 comments:

  1. Taylor Kirk3:58 PM

    Thanks, Spammer!

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  2. Eli Blake2:43 AM

    I blogged on this on Friday, and made an observation that seems to be true everywhere (I went to HS in Albuquerque). The observation was that it seems that in the U.S. there is a certain 'espanolaphobia' to coin a phrase. If students in a school speak French, German, Vietnamese or any other language in the hall, no one seems to care. It is only Spanish that people get upset about. Why do you think that is?

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  3. Eli Blake2:44 AM

    Looks like they have a new generation of spam robots out designed to 'pick' word verification locks.

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  4. Taylor Kirk9:58 AM

    Yes, silly spammers. I think the situation is better in Texas, where I grew up, because so many people are bilingual it would be silly to try to stop them from speaking both. Like the lady in the article said, it's an ASSET to speak more than one language.

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  5. Eli Blake10:25 PM

    I don't know, in Albuquerque there are an awful lot of Spanish speaking people. I think a lot of people feel unreasonably threatened.

    It also turns out that this particular school was on the Kansas side of the border, and Jay Leno had a great line about that:

    "He was lucky they only caught him speaking Spanish. Now, if they'd caught him discussing the Theory of Evolution in Spanish, then they'd really have come down hard on him."

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