• GAZLO
• CLASS
• JOBS
• AUTO
• HOMES

Spanish pledge angers veteran

EDGERTON — The Pledge of Allegiance had at least one veteran seeing red this week, and not because it’s a patriotic color.

When Todd Dix’s 17-year-old son, Kyle, reported that a group of students said the pledge in Spanish over the intercom at Edgerton High School on Tuesday, it made him sick to his stomach, he said.

“This is America; we speak English,” he said. “I don’t want any of my three boys coming home saying, ‘Dad we did the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish.’”

The school invites various students, staff and clubs to say the pledge over the intercom every day, usually in English, Principal Jim Halberg said.

Tuesday, students in a Spanish class asked to say the pledge in Spanish, and Halberg didn’t have a problem with it, he said.

“We looked at it as a positive, an opportunity for the kids to apply what they learned,” he said. “We certainly had no intent to be disrespectful to the Pledge of Allegiance or to the flag or anything else.”

This wasn’t the first time the pledge had been said in another language, Halberg said. The school hosts foreign exchange students every year, and it often invites them to say the pledge in their native languages, he said.

Still, the action didn’t sit well with Kyle Dix, whose father retired last year from the National Guard. Pledging in Spanish was disrespectful to the troops serving America in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kyle said.

“I believe the troops based this country off the old American values and not the Spanish values,” he said.

Jane Thompson, a member of Janesville’s Diversity Action Team, said she doesn’t believe saying the pledge in Spanish is disrespectful.

Thompson is a teacher at the Janesville Academy for International Studies and taught Spanish at Parker High School for many years. Spanish classes at Parker often learned the pledge in Spanish, she said.

“If you’re pledging allegiance to the United States of America, sincerely, that’s what you’re doing,” she said. “If it’s in Spanish or English, your allegiance is being pledged.”