16-year-old Zach Rubio was suspended from his Kansas high school for speaking Spanish. When one student asked him in Spanish to borrow a dollar, Zach responded with ‘No problema.’ For that response, he was ordered to leave school.
From the WaPo:
Most of the time, 16-year-old Zach Rubio converses in clear, unaccented American teen-speak, a form of English in which the three most common words are “like,” “whatever” and “totally.” But Zach is also fluent in his dad’s native language, Spanish — and that’s what got him suspended from school.
“It was, like, totally not in the classroom,” the high school junior said, recalling the infraction. “We were in the, like, hall or whatever, on restroom break. This kid I know, he’s like, ‘Me prestas un dolar?’ [‘Will you lend me a dollar?’] Well, he asked in Spanish; it just seemed natural to answer that way. So I’m like, ‘No problema.’ ”
But that conversation turned out to be a big problem for the staff at the Endeavor Alternative School, a small public high school in an ethnically mixed blue-collar neighborhood. A teacher who overheard the two boys sent Zach to the office, where Principal Jennifer Watts ordered him to call his father and leave the school.
The suspension was later overturned by the school district which stated speaking a foreign language is not grounds for dismissal, but it frightens me to think that we as Americans are so afraid of what we do not know that we will even kick a teenager out of school for speaking in a language that we might not understand.