A Season of Study In a Strange Land

For Some, First Day Brings Extra Anxiety

When she lived in Baghdad, Nadin Habib traveled to school with her father or an uncle, who brought along weapons to defend her from insurgents. One day a bomb hit the house next door to hers, killing her neighbors. Her parents thought she'd been killed, too, until they found her buried under debris.

So it was a little strange for her father to put Nadin, 9, and her sister, Talin, 5, on an Arlington County school bus and wave goodbye as it rolled off in the rain.

"I feel fine. I feel fine," Ali Habib said, walking back toward the apartment the family moved to three months ago when he became a diplomat in the Iraqi Embassy. "They are safe here."

Despite the rain, the first day of school generally went smoothly for more than 300,000 Northern Virginia students returning for the first day of school yesterday, a week after classes started in the District and most Maryland suburbs. Three new schools opened in Prince William County and one in Fairfax County. In fast-growing Loudoun County, it was the first opening day in 10 years without a new school.

For Nadin and hundreds of others from other countries embarking on their first day of school in the region, everything was new. Like new kids anywhere, they felt a little lost, surrounded by strangers and unsure where their classes were. But they had the added challenge of an unfamiliar linguistic and cultural landscape.

Schools in the Washington area these days often look like a miniature United Nations. Nadin's third-grade class at Oakridge Elementary School, for example, includes students from Azerbaijan, Brazil, Ethiopia, Albania, Belize and Mongolia.

Often, the influx reflects cataclysms around the world. In the late 1970s and early '80s, waves of students came from Vietnam and Iran after war and revolution in those countries; the 1980s also brought thousands of Salvadorans fleeing war there. Recently, Arlington has enrolled many students from Mongolia and Arab countries; Fairfax has had an increase this year in new students from Lebanon; and Prince William has noted mini-spikes as students flee volatile situations in Ghana and Nigeria.

School systems face a challenge in finding skilled teachers and interpreters to help the new arrivals. But such diversity also allows U.S.-born students to learn about world events firsthand. Schools host heritage assemblies at which students present native dances, foods and costumes. They also talk about harrowing experiences during times of unrest.

"When we had the war in El Salvador, they talked about how their families were separated," said Margarita Cruz, an assistant principal at Arlington's Washington-Lee High School. Some students went to the Salvadoran countryside to stay with grandparents, she said, while their parents migrated to the United States and later sent for them.

Immigration patterns vary from year to year and place to place. Although the number of students with limited English proficiency has declined in Arlington recently, the school system registers about 600 new students a year who are from abroad or were born here to parents with limited English. In Loudoun, the English as a Second Language program has grown about 20 percent each year for the past three years. In Fairfax, more than 20,900 students are in ESL classes, up from about 14,900 five years ago.

At Seneca Ridge Middle School in Sterling yesterday, Bence Karvalics, 12, wiped rain from his buzzed blond hair and explained the difference between school here and in his native Hungary.

There, "I understand everybody. I've got very lot of friends," he said.