Published: March 1, 2000

Fight Or Flight

Charlie Oliver and Claudia Pabo knew that their son Oleg's first days in kindergarten wouldn't be easy. It was the fall of 1998, a few months after the Washington, D.C., couple had adopted Oleg from an orphanage in Russia. The boy, then 5, could speak only a few words of English, and his appearance—his eyes are crossed, and he wears round, plastic glasses covered with corrective tape—made him a likely target for teasing.

Oleg was the third child that Oliver, a 51-year-old telecommunications lawyer, and Pabo, a 48-year-old government attorney, had adopted from Russia. The two others, Victor, 8, and Christina, 9, were thriving in private schools the parents had handpicked for them. Oleg, however, arrived in the States too late for the family to meet private-school application deadlines.

So with great trepidation, the couple decided to send him to Phoebe Hearst Elementary, the public school nearest to their home. Hearst is small and diverse, which Oliver and Pabo thought might suit Oleg, but they still worried that he wouldn't fit in. And given the well-publicized problems of the financially starved and politically turbulent D.C. school system, it was easy to imagine Oleg marginalized and stuck in a...