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Teaching Tolerace in the SCV?

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Photo of La Placita by ~db~ via LAist's flickr pool.

Santa Clarita, the city off the 5 freeway that claims home to Magic Mountain, is a family-oriented community with a mile-wide red streak in a decidedly blue state. And there’s definitely another divide between race and class in the area -- and it turns unseemly every once in awhile. Here’s one of those occasions.

While flipping through the pages of Inside SCV, a glossy local magazine, and we spotted this interview with Tim and Donna Borruel, founders of Legacy Christian Academy, a private Christian school in the area that boasts the “highest standardized test scores in the SCV.”

What’s the secret to their success? Check out the response:

…There are a lot of good things that public school can offer some children. However, we wanted to focus on ‘quality education and academic acceleration.’ Our program eliminates three big factors: non-English speaking students; behavior problem students and severely learning-deficient students. This gives our teachers a homogenous group to teach and we can bring them along quicker and provide more depth.

[empahsis added]So it’s a private school and they can make up their own rules, right? Keeping out kids who may be brilliant but can't speak English or those who may be in trouble in order to keep a more homogeneous population, doesn't sound very Christian-like to us. After all, Jesus Christ purportedly hung out with the outcasts--prostitutes, lepers, et al--of his own society.

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So maybe the school's founders might want to re-think about the legacy they're leaving their own students.

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