Something Has To Give

By Octavio J. Visiedo

The atuhor is the superintendent of the Dade County, Fla., public schools. He immigrated to the United States from Cuba in 1961.

Phuonglien Nguyen is an American. Conceived as Saigon fell, she was whisked from a homeland she would never know, across an ocean wrongly called Pacific, to a land rightly called free.

There, she was born in Miami. A gifted student, she studied hard in public schools as her mother cooked and sweated through years of 12-hour workdays. Last June in the South Florida suburbs, far from the fields of Vietnam, she become the first in her family to complete high school. She did so with honors. Today, the Westinghouse science-prize finalist is a...