AP: McConnell wants DMV to go English-only
South Carolina should stop giving driver’s license tests in foreign languages, in part because the practice breaks the law, Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell said Friday.
The Charleston Republican warned the Department of Motor Vehicles that if the agency doesn’t change its policy, he will introduce legislation next year forcing it to do so.
McConnell said drivers who don’t speak English can’t read highway message boards, which warn motorists about kidnappings, traffic accidents and hurricane evacuations.
“Is it good public policy to give driver’s licenses to people who can’t speak, read or understand English?” McConnell said.
The state Department of Motor Vehicles has no plans to stop giving tests in Spanish, German and French. Gov. Mark Sanford’s spokesman said the Republican governor had no objection to the tests.
“These tests provide an economical and common-sense solution when testing a foreign customer who needs a license, such as German BMW employees working at the Greer facility,” the Department of Motor Vehicle’s executive director, Marcia Adams, wrote McConnell on Thursday.
The issue also has surfaced in Alabama, where the state Supreme Court heard arguments last month on a challenge to the state’s drivers’ exams in 14 languages, including Farsi, Vietnamese and American sign language. The plaintiffs say English is the official language in Alabama.
While six states provide English-only tests, all allow translations or interpreters, according to court documents in the case.
The South Carolina Motor Vehicles Department has driver’s manuals in Spanish, but only about 10,000 of those remain from a 2002 printing. Adams said the agency has no plans to print more.
McConnell said the tests violate a law passed in 1987 declaring English as the state’s official language.
South Carolina’s law is found on the books between one naming the lettered olive as the state shell and one designating the spotted salamander the state amphibian.
The law says neither the state nor any other subdivision “shall require, by law, ordinance, regulation, order, decree, program, or policy, the use of any language other than English.”
Adams doesn’t think the agency is violating the law, but McConnell disagrees.
“This is an English-speaking state,” he said. “Our government is supposed to therefore print its forms and conduct itself in the English language. If we’ve got to have that debate, so be it.”
By Bruce Smith
Associated Press writer Seanna Adcox in Columbia contributed.
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