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Home arrow Our Focus Areas arrow Linda Chavez Weekly Columns arrow Segregating Students Is Not a Good Idea
Segregating Students Is Not a Good Idea PDF Print E-mail
Written by Linda Chavez   
Sunday, 15 March 2009
LindaChavez.gifIn the interest of full disclosure, I am chairwoman of the Virginia State Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which held a hearing in December 2007 on the situation in Prince William County that Ginger Thompson wrote about in her article. I am not writing this in that official capacity, but I have followed this issue closely and Ms. Thompson interviewed me at length for her article.

Immigrant children learn English best when they interact with native speakers. Segregating children during their high school years, no matter how well intentioned, retards their integration into the social mainstream and makes cultural assimilation more difficult.

The students at Hylton High School may be scoring well on tests — administered under different rules from those their English-speaking counterparts must abide by — but they are socially isolated. And that’s wrong.

Is it any surprise that Hylton’s mainstream students regard the students in the special school-within-a-school as alien? The vicious and counterproductive politics fostered by the Prince William County schools chairman, Corey Stewart, haven’t helped, but neither has setting up an education system that separates newcomers.
 
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