ELL News Headlines

For two years, The International High School at Langley Park (IHSLP), led by 32 year-old Principal Carlos Beato, has exclusively served immigrant and refugee students with a focus on English language learning. In its first year of existence, 98% of students improved on ESL scores — the highest growth for any high school in Prince George's County. That's especially impressive considering the students’ socioeconomic backgrounds: 99% of students qualify for free or reduced meals.

Girl Scouts from Daisies to teen Ambassadors may earn 23 new badges focused on science, technology, engineering and math. It's the largest addition of new badges in a decade for Girl Scouts of the USA. The effort takes a progressive approach to STEM and also nudges girls to become citizen scientists using the great outdoors as their laboratory. Sylvia Acevedo, the head of the Girl Scouts, was one of the first Hispanic students, male or female, to earn a graduate engineering degree from Stanford University. Her first job was as a rocket scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. More recently Acevedo was a tech executive.

Enrollment at Chicago Public Schools has been dropping for years, with particularly steep declines at the city's predominantly-black neighborhood high schools. CPS has predicted that trend will continue, but numbers released by CPS this week also indicate the district expects large declines at schools with mostly Latino students. Enrollment declines are watched closely because fewer students mean fewer dollars for the schools. Of Chicago's 95 high schools, 45 are projected to lose enrollment — and money — this fall.

Poet and educator Kwame Alexander stops by to chat about poetry with NPR's Rachel Martin. He shares some ideas for poems to read with kids and tips for getting kids to write some of their own.

When Jessica Milliken arrived at J.E.B. Stuart High School in 2015 to head a program for recent arrivals to the United States, many of the students she helped oversee had left school in the sixth grade and spoke little or no English, having fled violence and instability in their homelands. Now, Stuart High is getting a $50,000 grant from Virginia to help teachers develop curriculum for its most challenged immigrant students, young people who may have the drive and the capacity to learn but have major academic gaps.

Summertime is supposed to be fun for children and families, but for millions, the absence of free school meals or discounted lunches is a cause for worry. Special correspondent Lisa Stark of Education Week reports from Nebraska on how food banks try to bridge the gap.

More than 400 refugees and immigrants have come to Gonzaga University to improve their English skills. In many Washington communities, people from Latin American nations are most prominent. And it’s true that there are many Spanish speakers here this week. But Hunter says the groups most represented come from other parts of the world. "I think the biggest pre-registration group this year was from the Marshall Islands, Marshallese. We’ve had before Russian speakers for a long time," Dr. James Hunter, program leader, said.

Two kindergarten teachers will pair up in a dual language immersion program at Waterford Elementary School for the first time in the Goshen Community Schools Corp. The program will be a two-way immersion, which means one teacher teaches all of the English and the other teaches all of the Spanish, according to Waterford Elementary Principal Katrina Overton.

Hoping to fend off a legal challenge to a program that has spared nearly 800,000 young immigrants from deportation, two veteran senators made a long-shot appeal to President Trump on Thursday to support legislation that would put those immigrants and thousands of others on a path to U.S. citizenship. Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) introduced "Dream Act" legislation that would grant permanent legal status to more than 1 million young people who arrived in the United States before they turned 18, passed security checks and met other criteria, including enrolling in college, joining the military or finding jobs. Immigrants must have lived in the United States for at least four years to apply. Sen. Graham said the United States faces a "moment of reckoning," stating, "When they write the history of these times, I'm going to be with these kids."

The Santa Barbara Public Library System is the recipient of a $10,000 grant from the California State Library to purchase bilingual books for children. This grant is part of the California Immigrant Alliance Project, funded through the Library Services and Technology Act, a federal program administered by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. These books will be added to the existing bilingual children’s book collections of all branches of the library system, including the Central, Eastside, Goleta, Montecito, Carpinteria, Solvang, and Buellton libraries.