ELL News Headlines

For the first time, Newark students who are still learning English will gain an edge when they apply to schools this year — part of the district’s ongoing effort to ensure that all schools serve their fair share of high-needs students. The city’s computerized enrollment system, which allows families to apply to most traditional and charter schools using an online portal, has for years given a preference to low-income students and those with disabilities. But it has not previously done that for English learners, even though they are more segregated than those other groups.

A new St. Louis University course is aiming to give law students hands-on experience with immigration law. The course, Removal Defense Project: Sheltering Vulnerable Immigrant Families and Children, will begin spring semester 2019. It centers on providing aspiring attorneys with the skills necessary to defend those in jeopardy of facing removal proceedings.

Democratic Assemblyman Tony Thurmond managed to come from behind to emerge as California’s new superintendent of public instruction, beating out Marshall Tuck, a fellow Democrat and former Los Angeles executive of charter schools and educational nonprofits. Thurmond sponsored California Assembly Bill 2514 which was passed in September, allocating $300,000 in grant funding to eligible schools, county offices of education and consortia to expand or initiate new dual language immersion or developmental bilingual programs. Thurmond lived in San Jose, where he was raised by a single mother, a teacher from Panama, who died of cancer in 1974, when he was 6. He then moved to Philadelphia, where he was adopted and raised by his cousin and stepfather.

City public schools have over 3,500 students who do not speak English as a native language. The system has only 50 certified bilingual teachers to teach those students. That English Language Learner-to-bilingual teacher imbalance emerged recently during a wide-ranging, two-and-a-half-hour workshop that the Board of Alders Education Committee held in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

A growing number of families and children apprehended at the U.S. border with Mexico are requiring medical treatment after a rigorous journey north in very crowded conditions, the head of Border Patrol said Monday. At the close of a month in which two young Guatemalan children died in federal custody, six children were among 17 migrants hospitalized with illnesses, said Kevin K. McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.

For the first time in Newbery history, the winner and all three honor books were written by authors of color. “I get messages from people in the Philippines who are just very proud that a Filipina-American has been recognized,” says Kelly. “When you have a group of people saying they’re so proud you’re representing the community, it’s like ‘Whoa.’” Lara Saguisag, an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, hopes Kelly’s novels and success help Filipino and Filipino-American kids “recognize they are worthy of being in stories” and even inspire them to create their own.

Baltimore's Stoop Stories is a 12-year-old live show and podcast wherein people from all walks of life tell their tales. The premise is simple: Everyone has a story. But then few have one as horrific, heartbreaking — and ultimately inspiring — as the one told by Jacob Atem, who was born in the part of Sudan that is now the independent country of South Sudan and who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Humanitarian Health. Atem is a former Lost Boy, one of some 40,000 children orphaned by the Sudanese civil war in the 1990s. They fled the country on foot via arduous cross-country treks and spent years in refugee camps. Nearly 4,000 were ultimately resettled in the U.S.

For as long as he can remember, Angel Benavides has missed the beginning of the school year in Texas because his family stays in North Dakota through the harvest. It's weather-dependent, so there's no hard end; all Angel knows is they'll head home to Texas sometime in October or November. That flexibility is a big deal for employers who rely on seasonal workers to quickly harvest and process crops before they spoil. But it puts workers' kids — more than 300,000 of them nationwide, according to the Department of Education — in a tough situation: keeping their grades up in a system designed for students who start and finish the year at the same school.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Brigitte Alepin, the creator of "Radio Dodo," or Sleepytime Radio, a program that creates bedtime stories for Syrian refugees.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke Friday about a book she’s working on about kids with "life challenges," such as attention deficit disorder, autism, blindness and diabetes. Sotomayor, who was diagnosed with diabetes as a child, she said she wanted to write a book about "all of the common challenges, some visible and not so visible, that kids grow up in the world experiencing."