ELL News Headlines

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said that the seed for what has become her latest children's book was planted the day a woman called her a drug addict. Sotomayor, who was diagnosed with diabetes at age 7, had gone to the bathroom of an upscale New York restaurant to give herself an insulin shot. She was in her 30s but hiding her diabetes. Another diner came in and saw her and later, as Sotomayor was leaving the restaurant, she heard the woman tell a companion: "She's a drug addict." Outraged, Sotomayor confronted her, explaining that the shot was medicine, not drugs: "If you don't know something, ask, don't assume," Sotomayor said. From that exchange comes the title of Sotomayor's latest book, "Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You," released Tuesday and intended for kids age 4 to 8.

The Trump administration on Monday announced it would reopen and process some applications from seriously ill immigrants who asked for a temporary reprieve from deportation while they undergo life-saving medical care in the U.S., reversing course in part on a decision that has drawn withering criticism from immigrant advocates and Democrats.

Even be­fore she took her first class as a first-year stu­dent at Har­vard, Amy Cha­lan, whose family is from Ecuador, was giv­ing back to her home­town of Tar­ry­town and, in par­tic­u­lar, to the area's His­panic com­mu­nity—and with Har­vard's help. Dur­ing her sum­mer fol­low­ing grad­u­a­tion from The Hack­ley School, Cha­lan sup­ple­mented the work she had been do­ing for Hud­son Schol­ars, an aca­d­e­mic en­rich­ment pro­gram for area low-in­come, aca­d­e­m­i­cally promis­ing mid­dle school­ers, by start­ing a pro­gram for their par­ents.

The number of students learning English as a second language in Missouri schools has skyrocketed more than tenfold since the mid-1980s. According to DESE, the most common foreign languages in Missouri are Spanish, Arabic and Vietnamese. That's not the case in Morrisville, where the most common language is Romanian.

Marley Dias was 10 when she first decided to distribute children’s books with black girl leads – a campaign that has taken her to the White House. Now she’s written a book of her own.

It was the summer of 2018, and facilities that housed unaccompanied migrant children were facing a crisis. As the Trump administration rolled out its "zero tolerance" immigration policy, the facilities were asked to detain and care for children who were younger than those they typically held and were enduring trauma staff members were unprepared to address: forced separation from their parents. "The little ones don't know how to express what they are feeling, what has happened. Communication is limited and difficult. They need more attention," one program director told investigators with the Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG). The agency recounted problems caused by the short-lived "zero tolerance" policy in a pair of reports released Wednesday.

The devastation in the Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian is unprecedented and catastrophic. Although homes, roadways and some airports remain submerged, chef José Andrés has traveled to the territory with his nonprofit organization, World Central Kitchen, on a mission to feed the victims of the disaster. He spoke with Judy Woodruff about why the islands are so vulnerable and how Americans can help.

Hurricane Dorian struck the northern Bahamas as a Category 5 hurricane on Sunday and stalled over the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama Island for two days. The destructive winds, torrential rains and relentless flooding has likely destroyed more than 10,000 homes and wiped out much of the infrastructure, especially in the Abacos. Aid experts say there will be immediate emergency needs before the long, arduous task of rebuilding begins.

Just days into the new school year, hundreds of schools and universities across four states shut their doors as communities braced for Hurricane Dorian, which was expected to bring high winds and heavy rain to the U.S. mainland.

The numbers appeared troubling. During the 2016-2017 school year, 64 percent of English-language learners who took state reading exams in Virginia passed, according to state data. Two years later, passing rates plunged to 35 percent. But the numbers didn't paint a complete picture. Previously, Virginia education officials included the scores of those former English-language learners in their calculation of overall passing rates, for up to two years after the student was no longer classified as an English-language learner. That had the effect of inflating the passing rate for that group of students overall.