Students told to hold (native) tongue

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007 | 7 a.m.

The superintendent of the Esmeralda County School District has told parents from a small town that their high school children should speak only English on the bus and at school.

Superintendent Robert Aumagher wrote a letter Oct. 12 to the parents of Dyer, an alfalfa farming and cattle ranching town about 70 miles southwest of Tonopah, in which he calls English "a power language."

He adds that it may be "more comfortable for many (students) to speak their native language ... but what is always more comfortable is not always what is in their best interest." Aumagher was not available for comment.

But Maggie McLetchie, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, said her organization will be contacting the superintendent in hope of reversing his position, which she said violates the Constitution. "Students have a right to free speech, just like anybody else," she said.

Harley Shaiken, chairman of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, called the small rural school district's move a continuation of a nationwide trend. Towns, cities and states have been attempting to restrict actions including renting to undocumented immigrants and offering them jobs.

"Because we have a dysfunctional immigration system and in the absence of congressional reform, what we have is a thousand flowers in bloom on the local level - except a lot of them are weeds. It's a haphazard way of addressing locally what should be addressed nationally."

Language is often central to these responses, Shaiken said. "It's a reaction to the unknown."

The guideline affects about a dozen children from Hispanic families who ride a school bus more than an hour each way to and from Dyer, in Esmeralda County, and Tonopah High School, over the Nye County border. About 30 students ride the bus. Most of those the guideline affects are children of immigrants working on the area's farms and ranches.

Sherry Harrison, a Dyer resident with a son at Tonopah High School, said the letter was "just wrong." She said she was "never aware that language is even an issue in our community." And she expressed concern that Hispanic families may have been chilled by the letter but have not said anything because they are "afraid they will be retaliated against."

One Hispanic mother with two children at Tonopah High School said that most Hispanic families in Dyer considered the superintendent's move "discriminatory" - but she declined to offer her name, fearing reprisal from neighbors in the small town.

She said the guideline affected students who have been in the United States less than a year and a half and are still struggling with English. Some used to rely on bilingual classmates for help with their studies during the long ride home and now are afraid to do so.

She also noted that someone in the district had to translate the letter into Spanish so that families of the students would understand the new guideline.

Rita Gillum, an Esmeralda County school board member who voted in favor of the letter at the board's October meeting, said the letter resulted from an incident on the bus. "Apparently there was Spanish speaking in the line of being disrespectful, either to the bus driver or tutor," she said. She had no details on the incident, but said that if a bus driver or tutor "has no idea what they were talking about it can be very disrespectful."

"We're not going to allow that," she added.

Gillum also said the letter wasn't a policy per se and that the district had no punishment lined up if a student speaks Spanish on the bus or at school.

"If a student keeps speaking Spanish, it will be brought before the school board again," she said.

Harrison didn't understand why an individual student or students weren't disciplined instead of making a guideline or suggestion about not speaking Spanish that trickles down to Hispanic families in general.

Curiously, Al Eiseman, principal of Tonopah High School, said he hadn't seen or heard of the letter. "It's news to me," he said.

He noted that students do homework on the bus ride home, and that some students study Spanish. "If they're given a Spanish assignment, they should be able to do that," he said.

Shaiken said a school district should not be cutting down on the use of foreign languages, but rather the opposite.

"It flies in the face of what the rest of the world is trying to do - which is expand our reach ... in terms of our commerce, our trade," he said.

But Aumagher held a contrary position: Speaking Spanish holds children back. In his letter, he links low graduation rates among Hispanic students to speaking only Spanish. "I feel I have an obligation as a school official to do everything I can do to see that this disparity in graduation rates does not exist," he writes.

At the same time, he writes that he "deeply regret(s)" not having maintained his high school and college-level Spanish, now that he has a Spanish-speaking daughter-in-law.

In the end, Shaiken said, such local responses to Spanish speaking will inevitably accompany increased Hispanic immigration.

"Language issues always float to the top," he said.

"It's a cultural touchstone that attracts a lot of intensity ... and it's not going away anytime soon."