ELL News Headlines

Santa Fe Fiesta's Pet Parade (or Desfile de los Niños) is the inspiration for Judith Torres' new picture book "An Alphabet Pet Parade in Topsy-Turvy Town, Population 26." Torres, born and raised in Santa Fe, has many fond memories of the fiesta. But the event that remains most vivid is the Pet Parade, "seeing the other kids and their animals going around the plaza," she said in a phone interview from her home in central California.

Amazon is offering to cover four-year college tuition for most of its approximately 750,000 hourly workers in the United States, the latest major employer to offer the perk to attract and retain hourly employees in a tight job market. It will also begin covering high school diploma programs, GED's and English as a Second Language (ESL) certifications for employees.

The Justice Department has reached a settlement with Newark Public Schools to resolve the department's investigation into the school district’s programs for its students who are English-language learners. The agreement ends the district's longstanding and common practice of removing students from programs for English learners before they become fluent in English. The district has agreed to improve services for English-learning students, so they can access the same educational opportunities as other students in the Newark Public Schools.

As President Joe Biden announced the end of the longest war in U.S. history, schools across the nation prepared for an influx of refugees, who were among the more than 120,000 people that were evacuated from Afghanistan. 

When I was little, I used to love the books where you would connect the dots to make pictures. Some were very easy, you could tell what the picture was going to be even before you started, but some were very complex, and you had no idea what was going to emerge. The topic of Sept. 11, 2001 is very complex. On that day, when I was trying to comfort a classroom of terrified eighth graders — much less understand it myself — I couldn't see the dots that needed to be connected.

Debbie Reese reviews Sharice's Big Voice: A Native Kid Becomes a Congresswoman, a picture book by U.S. Congresswoman Sharice Davids with Nancy K. Mays.

Across New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana, families are still waiting to hear when their children can return to school, as districts assessed hurricane damage. Prior to Hurricane Ida, schools around Louisiana had been open despite widespread cases of COVID-19, although under a statewide mask mandate for all indoor locations.

Last year's COVID-19 lockdown disrupted the idea of school as we know it and it forced educators to think outside of the box. For one elementary school principal in North Carolina, thinking outside of the box had him heading outside — literally.

Students at Quincy High and North Quincy High schools can take college credit courses this school year through an arrangement with Quincy College. The Early College High School program, which is overseen by the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, focuses on "high need" students — those from low-income families, with disabilities, or English language learners — who may not otherwise consider college an option, according to Quincy College Associate Vice President Meghan Cassidy.