ELL News Headlines

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.

According to the National Institute For Early Childhood Research, nearly half of all 3-year-olds and a third of all 4-year-olds in the United States were not enrolled in preschool in 2019. That's in large part because many parents can't afford it. Imagine a future where we changed that. A future where every American child had access to two years of preschool during a critical period of their mental development. How would their lives change? How would society change? It turns out, we kind of already know.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a new effort Monday to feed millions of children this summer, when free school meals traditionally reach just a small minority of the kids who rely on them the rest of the year. The move expands what's known as the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer, or P-EBT, program into the summer months, and USDA estimates it will reach more than 30 million children.