ELL News Headlines

Single mom Shashona Holmon couldn’t stop smiling as she dropped off her daughter Brooklynn at the Merced Heights Playground on Monday morning. For the first time in six months, Brooklynn Holmon, 9 — and 800 other San Francisco students — got dressed, pulled on a backpack and left home to learn.

Six months after schools closed amid the coronavirus crisis and with online learning in full swing, tens of thousand of students remain without adequate digital access and school districts in Los Angeles County report they still need nearly 50,000 computers and Wi-Fi hot spots.

After months of distance learning, students around the world are returning to the classroom -- even though many countries are bracing themselves for a second wave of coronavirus infections. What does the pandemic mean for children, parents and teachers this academic year? We take a global look, with special correspondents Olly Barratt, Lucy Hough, Patrick Hok and Michael Baleke reporting.

The coronavirus has shattered the familiar routines of life and school for students and teachers across the country, and subjected millions to the stresses of illness, lost jobs, and isolation. But in 10 Western states, thousands of children and the adults who educate them are reeling from yet another layer of trauma: wildfires.

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with two teachers — Noah Canton and Jessica Mallare-Best — about bringing current events, including wildfires, protests and the coronavirus, into their teaching.

This series will examine strategies we can use in the not-unusual situation when we witness one of our colleagues demonstrating that kind of bias with us, with other educators, or with students. In this post, Ixchell Reyes, Gina Laura Gullo, Cheryl Staats, Keisha Rembert, and Dr. Denita Harris offer their suggestions.

The new question-of-the-week is: How should teachers respond when a colleague says or does something — knowingly or unknowingly — that is racist? In this post, Dr. Angela M. Ward, Keturah Proctor, Emily Golightly, and Becky Corr (a member of AFT's ELL Educator cadre) contribute their commentaries.

Seventh-grader Ayleen Salvador Barraza has been waiting for school to start for months. Yet on Tuesday — the first day of school — she missed it.  "I didn’t know the password," she said dejectedly. "I only know the email. So I couldn't really go." This is just one small example of the computer and technology challenges students and a district where English is not the native language of many families face. In Aurora Public Schools, students come from more than 130 countries and speak 160 languages. Those parents and students rallied and brought their hopes and worries to school district officials in a recent Zoom forum hosted by RISE Colorado, an education equity advocate.

The new question-of-the-week is: "What are effective instructional strategies to use when teaching an online class?" This new series continues a 25-post "blitz" that began on Aug. 1 supporting teachers as we enter a pandemic-fueled school year.

Schools around the country have been grappling with how or even whether to reopen. In the two isolated farming towns of Grandview and Bruneau, which form the joint school district, there are fewer than a dozen known COVID-19 cases. But in nearby more urban counties, where some of the staff here commute from, infection rates continue to climb out of control.