A group of German students from Arlington’s sister city of Aachen, Germany has managed to fluster members of two Arlington governing bodies nearly simultaneously.
The group of nearly two dozen students attended last night’s county board tax rate hearing. They were acknowledged by board chairman Jay Fisette at the beginning of the session. Fisette assumed they were going to stick around to watch American democracy in action. Instead, seven minutes into the hearing, they all suddenly got up and left en masse, which caused some board members fits of laughter (see video below).
Meanwhile, at the school board meeting (which, for some reason, was held at the same time as the county board hearing), board members were told at length about the exchange students and the host parents and the sister city program. But when the puzzled-looking presenter asked if there were any Aachen students in the audience, apparently expecting at least a few to be there, the Germans were nowhere to be found.
