This new teacher, a Cambodian immigrant, has gone back to his California childhood school to teach. Even though it has horrible memories (his sister was murdered there), he is now teaching third grade, and wants to be as good a teacher as the ones he had. DP
By Roger Phillips, Record Staff Writer
As children line up for a playground game or joke around with their friends, 28-year-old Rann Chun stays alert.
He is staring in the distance at the fence at the back of the playground at Cleveland School, making sure nothing unusual is going on. He knows what can happen.
"I'm always looking at every direction and always scanning and just making sure that I look out at every direction," said Chun, a third-grade teacher at Cleveland. "I think it's not a bad idea."
Twenty years after his 6-year-old sister, Ram, died at Cleveland - one of five children killed by Patrick Purdy on Jan. 17, 1989 - Chun is in his fourth year as a teacher at the school.
It is his first full-time teaching job. He got the position after graduating from University of the Pacific in 2004.
He never told himself, "No, I won't come back to Cleveland School because of any incident in the past."
Instead, Chun told himself, "Well, that is my place. I used to be there; my teachers are there. I respected them. ... There's lots of bad memories, but there are also lots of good memories."
Principal Pat Busher, who retired in 2006 after 22 years at Cleveland, makes it clear she was thrilled when the boy who had lived through the tragedy wanted to return to the school as a man.
"I knew his family well because he lost his sister," Busher said in an interview with former Record reporter Dianne Barth. "I visited the family frequently out of concern. ... Rann was just a wonderful, wonderful little boy, so very bright. And he grew to be this handsome young man who came back and said, 'Mrs. Busher, I want to teach at your school.'
"It was one of our proudest moments."
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