By Timothy Pratt

Sat, Feb 23, 2008 (2 a.m.)

State and national civil liberties advocates have compelled a rural Nevada school district to roll back a policy prohibiting high school students from speaking Spanish on the bus.

The guideline was approved at an October school board meeting and affected about a dozen children from Hispanic families who ride a school bus more than an hour each way between Dyer, in Esmeralda County, and Tonopah High School, over the Nye County line. Most of the Hispanic children are from immigrant families drawn to the area to work its cattle ranches and alfalfa farms.

Robert Aumaugher, Esmeralda School District superintendent, said his policy was motivated by a desire to get the Hispanic students to improve their English, although he also acknowledged that the issue arose from a conflict between a bus driver and two students who spoke Spanish to each other. The bus driver did not understand what they were saying and told Aumaugher he thought it was inappropriate for the students to be speaking Spanish to each other on the bus.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the policy unconstitutional and discriminatory.

The organization and its national Immigrants’ Rights Project worked with Aumaugher to create a new policy that encourages students to practice English during the bus trip’s first 45 minutes, a required academic period. Students can speak whatever language they want for the remainder of the ride.

“Once the superintendent was informed that prohibiting students from speaking Spanish violated their rights, the School District was very willing to work out a policy that both encourages students to practice their English skills and allows them to speak their native language,” said Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada.

But beyond the 12 students in a rural county, Thursday’s announcement of the new policy draws attention to how Nevada has been drawn into a national trend in which communities find themselves seeking ways to respond to increased immigration. In the absence of fixes to the federal immigration system, observerssay, those communities increasingly adopt policies and ordinances on the issue.

This was seen in Pahrump in 2006, as a back-and-forth series of town board meetings saw the passing and then the repeal of an ordinance that, in its original version, attempted to legislate the use of flags, the speaking of languages and the renting of apartments to undocumented immigrants.

“The context is immigration,” Peck said about the Esmeralda County case. “There are so many newcomers into the United States and as a result, communities like Esmeralda County increase in diversity. This presents complexities and challenges that people need to meet.”

Nationwide, state lawmakers introduced 1,562 bills involving immigration last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a Washington-based think tank.

There were only 550 such bills the year before.

To Tomas Jimenez, an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation who studies immigration and assimilation, the policies, ordinances and laws seen across the nation are “all partially motivated by people who are disgruntled by a change in culture.”

Peck notes, however, that there is a difference between what he calls “the many misguided ordinances that are sometimes mean-spirited and often unduly divisive,” such as the one in Pahrump, and the situation in Esmeralda County. The latter, he said, was “more a product of misunderstanding and miscommunication, and perhaps a little insensitivity.”

Peck called the outcome in Esmeralda County a model for elsewhere. “This is the way communities should be dealing with these things. When the superintendent and School District were presented with the problems we had with the policy, they were more than willing to sit down and work through the issues.”

Of course outsiders may be insensitive, or at least unaware, of certain realities facing a town such as Dyer, 70 miles southwest of Tonopah.

Like the workforce Aumaugher is dealing with.

If a teacher is absent, there’s no substitute, for example. And then there’s the bus driver.

“If the bus driver quits on me,” the superintendent said, “we don’t have somebody to drive the bus.”