Parental Rights and Testing

Re “School Says State Owes It $80,000,” Feb. 10.

From allowing administrators to deny parental rights in selecting bilingual education for their children to punishing school districts for allowing parents to prevent their children from becoming caught up in the Stanford 9 English language litmus test, immigrant parents are being told that their rights are less than other people’s rights.

Parental involvement is a missing element in many schools. Yet when the involvement comes from a segment in which many cannot vote for political representatives, these rights are being denied by the same government that gives them.

The title of the bilingual waiver form in the Santa Paula Elementary School District was translated from “Parental Exception Waiver Form” into Spanish as “Voluntarily Renouncing a Right” the first year under the anti-bilingual Proposition 227. This district has changed the wording only after denying bad intentions, yet parental rights were denied, and numbers are still much lower in this district than surrounding districts that recognized the rights of their constituents.

Now the state Board of Education is telling school districts that they will be punished if too many parents decide to exercise their right to exempt their child from the state’s academic test that even English-only speaking students are finding difficult to pass. These parents see the hypocrisy in how schools that pass the English language Stanford 9 test are rewarded while the state’s Spanish-language academic test has no value. The state is only rewarding academics in English.

DENIS O’LEARY

President

Ventura County Chapter

California Assn.

for Bilingual Education

Oxnard