ELL News Headlines

A school-based center for the parents of English learners has opened in Bridgeport. The Newcomer Arrival Center will support new arrivals to the United States and non-English speaking families in the district’s schools, according to Make the Road Connecticut, an immigrants rights group.

Over the next two years, 11 organizations will each be granted up to $1 million to improve Algebra outcomes for Black and Latino students, English-language learners, and students experiencing poverty. These grants are courtesy of the Gates Foundation, through its Grand Challenges platform—an initiative that targets persistent challenges in global health and development.

The country’s 5 million English-language learner-students—three-quarters of whom speak Spanish as their home language, federal data show—faced unique challenges during the periods of remote schooling last year. Some worry that these students may have regressed in their English skills during that time. But experts say that these students also experienced potential benefits from spending more time at home immersed in their families’ languages and cultures. They say teachers will need to give English-learners proper support going forward, which includes ensuring they are learning language within content and not in isolation; doing holistic assessments that take into account any gains made in home languages; and most importantly, avoiding assumptions on how much or how little progress was made in English-language skills.

This upcoming webinar on 8/25 at 2pm ET explores these and other support strategies for educators working with English-learners this fall.

Months of isolation away from the classroom has helped bring down the emotional well-being among many students in the Castro Valley Unified School District, they and their teachers told KQED. School officials hope to start the healing process through art and increased access to mental health professionals.

The number of school librarians around the country has fallen about 20 percent in the last decade, and districts with large numbers of vulnerable students are the most impacted, according to a new report from the School Librarian Investigation: Decline or Evolution? (SLIDE) research project.

As the pandemic upended life in the United States, more than one million children who had been expected to enroll in these schools did not show up, either in person or online. The missing students were concentrated in the younger grades, with the steepest drop in kindergarten — more than 340,000 students, according to government data.

Senior year didn’t turn out exactly how 18-year-old Monalie Bohannon had imagined it. Instead of playing basketball for Hamilton High School in Anza, California, or making new memories with her friends, she spent the year attending classes online, working at her tribe’s gas station and babysitting her younger cousins.

Larry Ferlazzo shares responses from four educators to the question, "What are effective strategies for multilingual learners?"

Debbie Reese shares a recommendation and review for I Sang You Down from the Stars, written by Tasha Spillett-Sumner (Inninewak (Cree) and Trinidadian) and illustrated by Michaela Goade (Tlingit, member of the Kiks.ådi Clan). Goade is the winner of the 2021 Caldecott Medal.

Multilingual learners (MLLs) have faced unprecedented challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Less than half were logging on for online instruction in the spring of 2020, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute. Here are some of the creative ways educators responded.