ELL News Headlines

Parkland, Fla., is experiencing a fresh wave of grief after the recent suicides of two students who survived the mass school shooting there last year. A swell of coverage of those deaths—and of an apparent suicide of the father of a child who died in the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn.—are driving questions about suicide contagion, trauma, survivor's guilt, and student mental health to the forefront. And those questions are relevant to educators around the country, even if their students haven't survived a collective trauma that dominated headlines.

The experience of walking under thickly polluted skies on a trip to China in middle school remains vivid years later in Catherine ­Xiang’s memory. Now 17, she has become an environmental advocate. The Oakton High School student is far from alone in her fears about the planet’s future. Millennials and members of Generation Z acknowledge in greater numbers than their forebears that humans contribute to climate change. In recent years, high school students across Fairfax County, Va., have lobbied local officials to install solar panels at schools — a movement that struck success when the Fairfax County School Board approved plans in January to install the panels at three schools.

How can schools create an environment where Muslim students feel safe and respected? How can schools prevent and address anti-Muslim bullying, rhetoric, and activity, both in the classroom and in the school community? And how can schools offer students support after traumatic events such as the attacks at a mosque in New Zealand? Here is a collection of resources on the topic and ideas on how to use books and author interviews to foster empathy and spark dialogue; we'll add new resources as they become available.

The national shortage of multilingual educators has caught the eye of Congress and led school districts to travel overseas and off the U.S. mainland to fill vacancies or newly created positions. Now, a Washington-based think tank has released a guide to help school districts and states that want to identify, develop, and hire bilingual educators in their own communities.  

In sixth grade, Ana Humphrey attended the nation's oldest and most prestigious high school science competition and was inspired after speaking with a student who claimed the top prize that year. Humphrey left that year with dreams of conducting her own research. On Tuesday night, at a black-tie gala inside a soaring hall at the National Building Museum in Washington, the 18-year-old from the city of Alexandria, Va., was awarded the $250,000 top prize at the Regeneron Science Talent Search. Humphrey is the only student from her high school in at least the past decade to place in the competition’s top 10.

Zimbabweans have started raising funds and donating goods to provide relief to those who have been affected by Cyclone Idai, which the government says has killed nearly 100 people and displaced hundreds. The government says people are wary of who receives the donations.

As the end of the school year approached last June, two dozen Filipino teachers packed up their lives, their children and all their belongings. Their visas were expiring, forcing them to move back to a country they hadn’t called home for years and leave behind the students they cherished in Baltimore. Now, after months of advocacy, most of them have been allowed to return — and they are back in their positions in Baltimore classrooms.

"I sometimes dream in Spanish," wrote Bakir Brown. "I was first introduced and fell in love with the language by watching 'Sesame Street.' I just loved how the words just literally rolled off the tongue. It was beautiful. I still remember (how) the skit from so long ago taught me my first Spanish words, "abierto" and "cerrado" -- "open" and "closed." Brown was among scores of readers who responded to a question about languages CNN Opinion posed as part of an op-ed by Reyna Grande, author of the memoirs "The Distance Between Us" and "A Dream Called Home," about her experience in the US school system after leaving Mexico.

Bilingualism Matters, an international research and information center, will launch its Chicago chapter on Tuesday, March 19, hoping to bring the science of bilingualism to the wider Chicago community, including schools and parents.

A pair of bills introduced in the Florida legislature would allow English-language learners to take state tests in their native languages, bypassing a key provision in the state's Every Students Succeeds Act plan.