STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND

By WENDY COLE WAUSAU

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, WAUSAU, WISCONSIN, WAS HOMOGENEOUS AND COMPLACENT, among the whitest of cities in the country. No longer: beginning in the late 1970s, local churches began sponsoring displaced refugees from the wars in Southeast Asia, allowing them to settle in Wausau. As a result, the town (pop. 38,000) is now 15% Hmong, a people native to the mountains of Indochina who speak a language that until the 1950s had no written form.

Nowhere has the transformation been as dramatic and tense as in Wausau's school system, where today 30% of elementary students are Southeast Asian. Yet there is no formal bilingual program in Wausau because there are virtually no certified Hmong-speaking teachers. So the school system has relied on teaching English with assistance from bilingual aides, who step in to make the transition to the new language easier. But as the vast majority of Hmong children became concentrated in four of the district's 13 elementary schools, test scores showed the immigrant children were not keeping up with their U.S.-born peers. Two years ago, Lincoln Elementary School had a Hmong population of 70%. The situation prompted the school board to adopt a controversial busing plan in which six schools would swap about half their children. The restructuring, supported by 87% of teachers, was to boost academic achievement and bring together a community that was becoming more and more polarized by race.

Instead, the community rebelled. Five school-board members who supported the plan were later recalled. Last year the partnership effort was dropped. No one felt the fallout more than ousted board member Fred Prehn, who had championed the plan. "I received phone messages telling me that I would get a bullet in my head and that my child would never reach the first grade," said Prehn, a dentist. He says eight white families stormed into his office, denounced him as a "Hmong lover" and took their business elsewhere. Under threat of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, the new board conceived a plan for racial balance in the schools by redefining the boundaries of some neighborhoods. And while the busing continues, it is now mostly Hmong children who travel to other neighborhoods each day.

This year the district sought and received $700,000 in new federal grants, which pay for, among other things, a newcomer center that provides intensive half-day courses in English as a Second Language. Shu Blong Her, a bilingual aide at Horace Mann Middle School, says new arrivals have an easier time now than when he arrived in Wausau in 1979. "I struggled more, but I'm moving up O.K. I'm getting used to the life-style of this country," he says. Wausau fifth-grader Chia Vang arrived five years ago and is currently fluent in English but still finds it tough to fit in at school: "I try to make friends with Americans, but it's hard because sometimes I'm shy to ask them."

No one disputes that English will be the common language of all Wausau citizens. "Right now we are like a new baby learning to walk and talk. But that will change," says Blong Moua, a Hmong job-placement counselor. The change has already started. Though 40% of Hmong are unemployed, nearly 90% of Hmong students graduate from high school--the same rate as among their white counterparts. "I don't know how much time it will take," says Peter Yang, who heads the Hmong Mutual Association. "But a Hmong can become mayor of Wausau."