Early Tuesday morning, a panicked voice awoke Maritza Guzman de Villatoro. A bridge in Baltimore had collapsed, her daughter shouted. A familiar pit soon formed in her stomach. Last March, a speeding car plowed between highway barriers on the same Baltimore highway and killed six workers, including Villatoro’s husband and brother-in-law. That crash along Interstate 695 was about 20 miles from the bridge. Now, a massive ship stacked with containers had crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing its collapse. Six workers, all native to Latin America, were lost in the Patapsco River and presumed dead. One of the victims, Miguel Luna, came from the same area in El Salvador as Villatoro and her husband, near the southeastern city of Usulutan, she said.
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Migrant students in Philadelphia aren’t getting the support they need, advocacy group says
Zulma Guzman came to Philadelphia from El Salvador in 2019 and is a part of South Philadelphia’s Hispanic community. But she’s had a difficult time getting comfortable as the parent of three students in the city’s public schools.
How to Make PE More Inclusive
When gym class is a place where all students feel welcome, phys ed has the power to help kids develop lifelong habits of well-being.
LISTEN: Migrant students navigate a new reality
The first episode of P.S. Weekly focuses on one of the biggest education stories in New York City this year: the arrival of thousands of migrant students. Officials estimate that more than 36,000 migrant students have enrolled in city schools over the past two years.
Should 4-year-olds have to take an English proficiency test?
The initial English Language Proficiency Assessment for California (ELPAC) is used to determine whether new students will be designated English learners. Under current law, the test must be given to all students whose parents speak another language at home within the first 30 days of enrollment in kindergarten through 12th grade. The test measures proficiency in four domains — listening, speaking, reading and writing in English. The test is different for each grade. But since transitional kindergarten, often referred to as TK, is classified as the first year of a two-year kindergarten program, and not as a separate grade, schools have had to administer the test to students as young as 4 years old.
Virginia Beavert, Who Preserved a Language the U.S. Tried to Erase, Dies at 102
A linguist from the Yakama Nation, she wrote dictionaries and helped build the infrastructure to teach a language that wasn’t traditionally written down.
Bridge collapse brings stark reminder of immigrant workers’ vulnerabilities
Apps are helping teachers communicate with families that don’t speak English
Emma Gonzalez Gutierrez has struggled to communicate with the teachers of her five children for years. She’s tried to stay engaged. She’s attended meetings, gravitated toward Spanish-speaking staff, and relied on translators, including her kids, over the years. Now, thanks to an app that McElwain Elementary, her Adams 12 school, started using this year, she’s found opportunities to engage in new ways with her youngest child’s education.
Smoothing the path for immigrants to finish their college degrees
When Carlos Sanchez immigrated to Grand Rapids, Michigan, from Mexico City 25 years ago, he’d already completed two years of college at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he was determined to finish his degree. Already bilingual, he felt comfortable tackling the second half of his education in English. But the language barrier was only part of the challenge.
Amid influx of students new to the country, English development teachers in Colorado feel overwhelmed
This school year has been overwhelming for teachers like Joel Mollman. As an English language development teacher at Hamilton Middle School in Denver, Mollman has had to take on more work to keep up with the growing number of students who need help learning English.
Activists tap a sweet Indigenous tradition to connect youth of color in Detroit with the outdoors
Tucked into Detroit’s 1,200 acre Rouge Park is one of the nation’s largest urban sugar maple tree groves in the country. But for years, the trees went unharvested. While making syrup from tree sap is an ancient tradition of the Anishinaabe who first inhabited the Great Lakes region, it had fallen from local practice. But after learning about sugarbush traditions from Ojibwe and Cree peoples from across the Great Lakes region, Antonio Rafael and shakara tyler of Detroit and David Pitawanakwat of Wikwemikong First Nation wanted to bring this traditional ecological activity back to the city.
