ELL News Headlines

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.

Ave Weekes-Stephens had her work cut out for her the day she took over as principal in 2010 at Cane End Government School, a primary school in St. Vincent in the Eastern Caribbean. The school had very few books. There was no library. Many kids struggled with reading. "The students' literacy levels were way below their age and grade level," she said. So she set her sights on creating a school library, which seemed like an uphill task since reading materials were limited. A lack of resources has historically dogged the island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, a mountainous enclave lapped by a turquoise sea, where 30 percent of residents live in poverty. Weekes-Stephens said she noticed a turnaround at Cane End Government after the school, working with a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, got connected in 2012 with a nonprofit called Hands Across the Sea, and new books started appearing in her library. Not old, yellowed books discarded by tourists. They were titles the kids wanted to read like "Shauna's Hurricane" by Francine Jacobs and the "Junie. B. Jones" series.

More female, black and Latino students took Advanced Placement computer science courses this year, USA TODAY reports, with participation also rising for rural students.

The National Book Festival on Saturday was the largest in the event's 18-year history, according to estimates from several Library of Congress officials. The festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress since 2001, drew at least 200,000 readers to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown D.C. They listened to talks and interviews with more than 100 authors, including a number of authors for children and teens. Politics and Prose, the official bookseller of the festival, sold more than 17,000 books, a record, according to P&P co-owner Bradley Graham.

Author Katherine Marsh wrote the young adult novel Nowhere Boy — about a teenage Syrian refugee whose father dies on the journey to Europe — in part to help her kids make sense of big, complex topics like immigrant integration, terrorism and the refugee crisis.