ELL News Headlines

With rain and wind from Hurricane Florence already lashing the Carolina coasts, school officials are worried about the massive amounts of rain the storm is expected to dump in the region. Whatever relief they felt when Hurricane Florence was downgraded from a Category 4 to a Category 2 storm was quickly replaced with anxiety over the widespread flooding could result from the storm's effects lingering into next week.

More Latinos are graduating from college than in years past, but they still lag far behind their white peers: about 32 percent graduate from college in four years compared with 45 percent of white students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The Council for Adult and Experiential Learning and the Latino student advocacy group Excelencia in Education have joined forces to introduce an initiative this academic year to shrink this gap by helping working, adult students.

Around the globe, more scholars are now threatened and displaced than since World War II began. In response, U.S. universities have sponsored endangered scholars and recently created a consortium that offers a broader academic community to refugee scholars threatened by war and authoritarian governments.

Salem — and a handful of other small- to mid-size cities — is blurring the lines between the role the school district and the city play in children's lives. It's main vehicle for that work is City Connects, a student-support system that city and school officials rolled out in pre-K-8 schools last year. The idea is that focusing on student's individual needs in four areas — academics, health, family, and social-emotional well-being — and matching them with the right kinds of assistance and enrichment programs, will lead to more successful citizens in the long run.

More than 800,000 students from North Carolina's Outer Banks to Newport News, Va., are out of school as districts shut their doors and battened down in anticipation of Hurricane Florence.

Hurricane Harvey — and its record rains — is long gone. But life may never be the same for thousands of children who spent the past school year — and will spend the one that just began — without a home. Their schools have been rebuilt. Their lives have not.

She has one of the most influential positions in the country, but as a girl who did not grow up privileged, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor credits her incredible journey to one thing. "The key to success in my life, it's the secret that I want to share with kids and how I became successful. I'm here as a Supreme Court Justice only because of books," said Sotomayor. An avid reader growing up, Sotomayor's new book for young readers, "Turning Pages: My Life Story," is a richly illustrated book featuring illustrations by Lulu Delacre that chronicles her life growing up in New York City. "Reading books opened the world to me. Especially for children growing up in modest means as I did, books give you the chance to explore the wider world."

The Trump administration is proposing to lift court-imposed limits on how long it can hold children in immigration detention. Under proposed regulations set to be published in the Federal Register on Friday, the administration seeks to replace the Flores settlement, a decades-old agreement that dictates how long the government can hold migrant children, and under what conditions.

Transition shock – defined in an Edutopia article as “an umbrella term that incorporates culture shock, chronic distress, traumatic upset, and post-traumatic stress disorder”— can affect many students in physiological, behavioral, and emotional ways; however, it especially affects English language learners (ELLs) because of the ways brain development impacts language development and learning capacity. Several strategies, which can also benefit other students affected by trauma and chronic stress, include providing students with a calm, organized class environment with regular schedules and seeking out student strengths to build confidence in themselves and trust in others.

Over 2,000 students have come to Connecticut from Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria. Many of them have settled in Connecticut's biggest cities, and their arrival has highlighted the need for more teachers who speak Spanish and who are certified to teach English language learners, or ELLs.