Maybe it's harsh to say you don't care. But not so harsh to say that requiring new immigrants to learn English and to learn English at THEIR expense or via a responsible sponsor should be the rule.
It is discriminatory in my opinion that only Spanish speaking students should be accommodated in the public schools at taxpayer expense when there are thousands of languages spoken on Earth. And even if we go with the major languages, it is still unreasonable to require the public schools to be equipped to teach Chinese, Spanish, French, Hindi or whatever.
Prior to 1968, I suppose there were some schools that already had proficient Spanish teachers that accommodated a large influx of Cuban refugee students but those were isolated incidents. For the most part new immigrants were to either be self sufficient and competent in English when they arrived or have private sponsors who would walk them through the assimilation process including finding tutors to teach them English.
That should still be the general rule.
I was very young but privileged to help our Church in West Texas sponsor a wonderful Cuban refugee family. Cuban born people are very rare in West Texas. We started out with my very limited Santa Fe street Spanish and our Pastor's French, English to Spanish books and vice versa but this was extremely tedious to help the family, a mother, father and two elementary age children become fluent.
We located a family immigrated from Mexico who did speak Spanish and they agreed to help and helped enormously even though their Mexican dialect varied at times from the Castilian Spanish the Cubans spoke. But work ethic and determination is the key to doing anything difficult and all the Cubans were speaking decent English within the year and the kids were able to go to public school and were quite successful there. Both the parents were college educated in Cuba and by the time they were sworn in as citizens, the father soon qualified to be certified to teach in the public schools and the mom became a school librarian.
We should expect new immigrants to be that kind of asset to America and not a burden on the taxpayers.
