ELL News Headlines

The number of Central American children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally has risen sharply over the last three years, and those numbers are impacting the D.C. area. In 2016, nearly 80,000 unaccompanied minors from Central America were released to communities throughout the nation; roughly 4,000 of them settled in the Washington region. Advocates say the increase is being driven by migrants’ fears of gang violence in their home countries — fears that outweigh heightened concerns about deportation under the Trump administration. And this is what the organizers of a local play "Óyeme, the beautiful" hope to address.

"At Denver Public Library [DPL], trauma walks through our doors every day," says Elissa Hardy, licensed clinical social worker and DPL community resource manager. As a result, throughout the library system, social workers and peer navigators train staff on how to view potentially difficult patron encounters through a trauma-informed lens. "What might appear to be a behavior ‘problem’ may actually be how an individual—including children—has learned to cope in their world," Hardy says.

On a muggy fall morning, pre-K teacher Ruth Shows inspected the work of students in her classroom, stepping over a cluster of little learners sprawled on the carpet. She watched a 4-year-old thrust her tiny hands into a plastic tub of rainbow-colored rice, scooping up handfuls of magnetic letters and numbers. Another began sorting the bounty, putting numbers into one tray and letters in another. What started as a treasure hunt had become a logic game in this state-funded pre-K classroom, a free early learning experience that’s only recently become available to a small number of students in Mississippi.

Middle school students in a handful of cities are getting a powerful and rare boost: a team of adult advisers who help them win acceptance to college-preparatory high school programs, an accomplishment that can pave their pathways to college.

In 1980, when Patricia Cantu started kindergarten in Houston, there wasn't much bilingual education at her school. "I walked in and it was only English —  that’s all it was," Cantu said. "I remember specifically singing the ABC’s and not having a clue what they were talking about. I remember just feeling lost and how helpless that feeling was as a four or five-year-old." Today, that makes Cantu uniquely qualified for her job. She leads the second language department in Alief ISD, southwest of Houston.

While no one book list can adequately explore all the variations in culture and traditions embodied within the broad category of the "Asian/Pacific American Experience," readers who identify as Asian American and/or Pacific American—especially as first-generation Americans—will find reflections of their own stories in these novels. Others will glean insight into lives that may seem unfamiliar at first glance.

Julia Keleher's relationship with Puerto Rico's education department has shifted for this second time this week. Two days after stepping down as the island's education secretary and shifting into the role of paid department adviser, Keleher is no longer advising the department.

President Trump, in his most recent rebuke of Central American nations for what he says is their failure to address the issue of migration, announced plans to cut off aid to three nations — Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — known as the Northern Triangle. Critics of the cuts say they will target programs aimed at preventing violence, curbing extreme poverty and hunger, and strengthening the justice system — the very problems residents of those countries give for leaving home and pursuing a more stable future elsewhere. Here are some examples of programs financed by American dollars in the three countries targeted by President Trump.

Using Google to translate Spanish text into English is a trick used by high school students to avoid doing their Spanish homework — not something you'd expect to see from candidates for the highest office in the land. Yet several Democratic White House hopefuls appear to be doing precisely that.

This month, one of the big news stories is about parents who bribed and cheated to get their kids into prestigious universities. And then there's the college admissions story of John Awiel Chol Diing. Diing, 25, is a former refugee from South Sudan and grew up in U.N.-supported camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. His family couldn't even afford high school fees, let alone college tuition. But today, thanks to an unlikely series of events, he is a student at Earth University in Costa Rica, finishing up his fourth year studying agricultural science.