Word of Mouth Puts Choice Into Young Lives : Education: San Diego school’s voluntary integration program often snowballs when a neighborhood starts to compare notes.

In 1982, while collecting rents at her duplexes along a two-block stretch of Z Street in Southeast San Diego, Sarah Buncom was approached by one of the Laotian immigrant tenants. He expressed concern that the children at nearby Balboa Elementary School, where his son had started school, were teasing his child. What could Mrs. Buncom, whom he knew was a San Diego city schools principal, do to help the family?

“I told him that, if he would like to send his child to my school, I would make sure his son would be treated well and that no one would pick on anyone,” recalled Buncom, the principal through 1985 at Bay Park Elementary in Clairemont.

Under the district’s then-new voluntary integration busing program, students living in the Z Street area were eligible for free transportation to attend predominantly white schools in the Clairemont area, including Bay Park.

The tenant thought over Buncom’s proposal, persuaded a neighbor to send his son as well, and took the principal up on her offer.

From that small beginning, the number of Laotian children at Bay Park has blossomed to a formidable group of more than 60 today--12.6% of the school’s enrollment--all from the concentrated two-block area just west of Interstate 805. It’s one of the district’s most telling examples of how word of mouth can cascade into a powerful voluntary busing program at an individual school.

A few students who find a friendly school environment tell their parents, who tell their neighbors, who then decide to send their children to the same school as well.

The program is now so ingrained at Bay Park that the school’s newer staff, including current Principal Barbara Coates, have never thought about its origins, and veteran teachers such as Judi Vignos have largely forgotten how it all started.

For the Laotian parents and children along Z Street, sandwiched between heavily black and Latino neighborhoods, Bay Park has become part and parcel of their lives. Only a handful of families use the neighborhood schools.

On the living-room wall of Khamsy Bouasisavath’s duplex, for example, the Bay Park accomplishments of daughter Phetmany--aka Bee--hang proudly: her several “Good Citizen of the Month” awards, her “Certificate of Good Accomplishment” in the first-grade enrichment reading program, and the school’s “Just Can’t Hide My Pride: a Bay Park Parent” bumper sticker. A calendar of upcoming parent and student events is on the bulletin board by the front door. The school provides special transportation for parents to come to school events.

“I think at first we were a little afraid to put our children on the bus,” said parent Douang Lasaath, who has three sons and one daughter at Bay Park. “But after we learned more about the school and visited it ourselves, we got used to it, and now there’s no problem.”

At a time when many segments of society have diminished or lost confidence in the public school system, the Laotian parents place great hopes in the public schools to build a bright future for their children.

Chanthala Khettavong, now an eighth-grader at Marston Middle School in Clairemont, said parents “want us kids to have a nice future, and they see Bay Park as the place where American students go, and they want us to make friends and be successful like other Americans.”

Although the Laotian children have their ups and downs in school just like any students--as well as the extra burden of learning English as quickly as they can in special language classes--they are praised for hard work by teachers.

“We support the parents, and they really support us and make sure students do their homework, and want to know how their child is doing,” fourth-grade teacher Pam Bacon said, “and that can make a lot of difference for the student.”

Buncom said that many of the parents “had been successful in Laos” before fleeing, and now they “pin their hopes on their children, and their children know.”

Bay Park aide Phadet Thongthepxumphou, a mathematics student at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, tutors the Laotian students and otherwise helps smooth out cultural problems, while also teaching elementary gymnastics to all Bay Park students.

“The parents always ask me how the students are doing, will I make sure that they are on time and well-behaved, and that they be punished if they do something wrong,” he said. “I try to stress that the kids need as much practice in English, in reading and writing, as possible. It’s hard at times for them.”

A group of students, most of them wearing their “Bay Park Bears” jog-a-thon T-shirts, crowded into the Bouasisavath’s living room last week to meet with a reporter. Whereas most primary-grade children proclaim “playtime” or “vacation” when asked in a group about their favorite subjects, the Laotian students almost unanimously voted math as best to study, and all said they do their homework regularly.

“That’s because we are smart in math,” said Keoviseth Lasaath to the nods of his peers. And, even though many struggle for several years with English reading--conversation comes much more quickly, teachers say--first-grader Joe Lomenhouth volunteered shyly that he enjoys “reading fairy tales” most.

Earlier this year, the parents invited Bacon, first-grade teacher Teresa Cope and resource specialist Amy Quinney to a Laotian New Year event in the neighborhood, complete with a celebration-ending, head-to-toe drenching in water as a token of good luck.

“They even provided plastic for our car seats so we wouldn’t soak them on our way home,” Cope said.

All this is a far cry from the initial work by Buncom in the mid-1980s.

“The teachers at the school really were the key to making the community feel comfortable,” Buncom said. “It’s a very strong teaching staff, and they are receptive to teaching all students.”

Despite the ease of transportation under the integration program--parents walk their children less than two blocks to one of three bus pickup points--Buncom said the community would not have continued with the program if the students did not enjoy Bay Park.

“I was always out in front of the school to greet the children off the bus, always out on the playground, and the teachers always were encouraging students to play and laugh and talk with each other.”

In fact, the program grew to the point where Buncom heard there were rumors around the school district that she was requiring parents to send their children to Bay Park as a condition for renting the duplexes.

“That was absolutely false, of course,” Buncom said. Attendance grew by word of mouth, in the same way the number of Laotian tenants increased, she said.

“It started with one family which liked the duplexes” because, unlike apartments, they only had one common wall and they could also have a garden, which was very important to them, Buncom said. More and more Laotian families began showing up to rent, she said.

“I happened to be in the (management) office one day, since I was trying to learn how to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodby’ in Laotian, and that’s when the first parent approached me to tell of his son’s trouble at school.

“Several people joke that I now have a Laotian village, but that’s fine. And, as for Bay Park, I knew that it would be best for the children, that they would be getting a better education. I was right.”