New school. New town. New country.

Sun Park remembers vividly the day her daughter came home from kindergarten in tears. A classmate in her suburban Detroit school had called her Chinese. The comment, which was probably made in ignorance, still felt like an insult. Asian-Americans don't appreciate being lumped into a single ethnic group. Ms. Park was frustrated but not surprised. As the community's lone Korean family in the mid-1980s, the Parks were accustomed to such slights.

Five years later, the family was living in Ann Arbor, Mich., and her daughter was bullied in a middle school gym class. Another student cut in and took a ball from her, saying "You go home," implying that the Korean girl did not belong in the US.

But by this time, Park knew her rights.

"I went to see the principal and said, 'What's going on here?' He called a meeting with the other girl and her mother. He said the most wonderful thing: 'Where do you think we all come from? We're all from somewhere else.' "

As the number of immigrant families living in the suburbs increases, school officials will need all the cultural sensitivity they can muster. Foreign-born parents need help negotiating the daunting world of American education. While some suburban districts are reaching out to these newcomers, others are slow to find ways to make these parents feel welcome.

The latest suburban immigrants are those with college degrees and money. Some arrived on H-1B (special skills) visas from India, Pakistan, China, South Korea, and Latin America. But poorer families are also finding their way to suburbs and satellite cities near big metropolitan areas, in search of better jobs, affordable housing, and safer schools. Even midsize cities have been affected: Lewiston, Maine, has been in the news because of strife between longtime residents and a 1,000-strong Somali refugee community.

The 2000 Census shows that suburbs around major cities have seen a rapid increase in their im- migrant populations: 48 percent of immigrants who arrived in metropolitan areas in the 1990s chose to live outside the central cities. Nonwhites accounted for the biggest suburban population gains, and Asians were the most likely group to choose suburbs. The numbers of immigrants with young children are expected to rise even further, studies show.

For immigrants, language skills are key. Parents who haven't learned English can feel shamed and marginalized, even by their own children.

Ricardo Gonzalez emigrated from Ecuador in 1974. He entered ninth grade after a crash course in English. Because his mother was working three jobs, she was too busy to talk about school.

"I kept quite a bit [of information] from my mom," he says. If he was having trouble with a teacher, or couldn't decide what course to take, he didn't ask her. "I didn't want to worry her, and she wouldn't have understood."

Parents who don't know English rely on their children for such things as translating school notices and explaining why a certain grade was given, leaving room for omissions and confusion.

"It reverses the parent-child power structure," says Eileen Kugler, a consultant to schools on diversity issues who lives in Springfield, Va. "How can you set limits if you don't speak the language?"

Limited English skills can make parents vulnerable to discrimination, even by other immigrants. "You always assumed the ones who didn't speak English weren't as smart," Mr. Gonzalez says.

On the other side, immigrants with English fluency and advanced degrees can become impatient with American schools, which they see as not being rigorous enough academically.

Nargis Jahan arrived in the United States from India in 1994, and she and her husband, who works for a pharmaceutical company, live in Wadsworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago.

Their sons attend the public elementary school. She says her family maintains cultural ties with other Indian families in the community, but that she feels welcome in her sons' school and among her mostly Christian neighbors. Her only criticism involves academics: "Every day, my sons don't have much homework."

These high achievers expect their children to do as well as they did or better, which for some means Ivy League colleges and doctoral degrees.

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