ELL News Headlines

Food shortages, damaged homes, fear of death, loved ones leaving. The cumulative stresses of Hurricane Maria contributed to thousands of schoolchildren developing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, in Puerto Rico, according to a study published Friday.

For the first time, this fiscal year the California Department of Education awarded $5 million through the Dual Language Learners Professional Development Grant to six organizations to train preschool teachers who work with dual-language learners.

The nation's federal K-12 law may be penalizing older English-language learners and the schools that educate them, a new report from the Migration Policy Institute argues. By making four-year graduation rates such a prominent part of school accountability plans, the Every Student Succeeds Act could lead administrators in traditional high schools to turn away older English-learner students who may need additional time to earn their high school diplomas, posits Julie Sugarman, a senior policy analyst with the institute and the report's author.

Nearly 4 million college students are student parents — that's about a fifth of all undergraduates. "These are the people we need to be investing in," says Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, who studies student parents at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "They're really facing the odds, working hard to provide for their families and that's what this country is built on." And the data shows that investing in these students is a good bet. Student parents have better GPAs and grades than their classmates without kids. But, they are less likely to graduate. "It's these other factors, these life factors that get in the way," says Reichlin Cruse.

ESL teachers at a high school in Hawaii believed a poetry project would help their language learners express themselves. The school has now self-published the collection of poems.

The percentage of English-language learners who graduated from Rhode Island's public high schools on time fell to 71.7 percent for the class of 2018, the third straight year that the state's fastest-growing student population has seen a decline in its graduation rate, the state announced Friday. The downward trend in outcomes for English learners — their graduation rate was 77 percent in 2015 — comes as policymakers continue to craft a long-term plan to improve performance metrics in Rhode Island schools.

The measles outbreak continues to spread in the U.S. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 695 cases. That's the highest number since 2000, when measles was declared eradicated in the U.S. There are now cases in 22 states, but the largest outbreaks have been in New York's ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Now a story of how measles spread from there to another community hundreds of miles away, and how local health officials are partnering with that community to address it.

TESOL International Association has pledged its support for the bipartisan Reaching English Learners Act (H.R. 1153, S. 5​45). The legislation would create a grant program for colleges and universities under Title II Part B of the Higher Education Act to support the development of teacher preparation programs that train future teachers to instruct ELs.

The teenage dancers twisted and twirled across sheets of plywood in the basement of the First Baptist Church of Astoria on Wednesday, waving their skirts and stamping their nailhead-packed Spanish dancing shoes in a Mexican polka. On May 3 at the Liberty Theatre, the Mi Cultura Folkloric Dance Group will perform several traditional Mexican dances as part of a Cinco de Mayo celebration.

The new question-of-the-week is: "What are the biggest challenges facing Native American students and how can they be addressed?" Today's responses are written by Timothy San Pedro, Alayna Eagle Shield, and Amanda Holmes.