Word: wausau
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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...
...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...
...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...
...makes close relationships impossible and cuts us off from the source of emotional nurturing we need, further intensifying insecurity, increasing withdrawal and so on in a spiraling cycle of despair. There are many more things than technology in our society that make us feel anxious and insecure. MARILYN KRAMER Wausau, Wisconsin...