ELL News Headlines

Nearly 12 years ago, Hamdia Ahmed boarded a plane bound for America. She had spent nearly all her young life in the Dadaab in Kenya, the world's largest refugee camp, along with hundreds of thousands of other Somalis fleeing civil war. And she had no knowledge of the country she would be calling home. Now the 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Southern Maine is finding her voice advocating for Portland's Muslim and immigrant community.

A Republican lawmaker in Oklahoma wants to round up the state's English-language-learner students in K-12 schools to be screened for deportation—a move that would violate federal law. According to Tulsa's News 9, state Rep. Mike Ritze of Tulsa says the newly formed Republican Platform Caucus would like to identify the 80,000-plus ELL students and "then turn them over to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to see if they are citizens." The caucus believes that rounding up the students could save the state up to $60 million. It's unclear how they reached that dollar amount. The proposal for mass deportation is part of a plan to fix the state's $878 million budget shortfall. While explaining the plan, Ritze questioned whether the state has to educate undocumented students. It does.

Natalia Hernández stood before dawn with a bullhorn in her hand in front of the mountainside elementary school that four generations of her family attended, rattling off its academic accomplishments. More than half the pupils are on the honor roll. There are tutors, a social worker and even a speech therapist, she said. But there has been an exodus of families from Puerto Rico in the face of its economic collapse, so little Luis Santaella School has a big problem: Only 146 children are enrolled compared with about 250 in the past. And so, like 178 other schools across the island, it is set to close after the last day of the school term this week, in part to help Puerto Rico battle debt and pension obligations of $123 billion. The school, perched alongside a winding two-lane road 1,400 feet above sea level, will join the many casualties of a fiscal crisis that forced Puerto Rico to declare a form of bankruptcy last week and sent hundreds of thousands of people packing in the past decade.

Advocates for bilingual education and District leaders argued Thursday that the Washington region’s workforce has a growing demand for bilingual speakers that could be filled by D.C. public school graduates if the school system boosted its dual-language education programs. The panel discussion featured D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson, school leaders from Delaware and New York, an economics researcher and the Swiss ambassador to the United States, who highlighted the advantages of bilingualism in Switzerland.

Schools that want to improve the educational prospects for English-language learners should take account of what's happening in their students' lives outside the classroom, a new report from the research arm of America's Promise Alliance finds. "I Came Here to Learn," the report by the Boston-based Center for Promise, sought to find out why the graduation rate for students whose first language isn't English lags behind those of their native English-speaking peers, in Massachusetts and elsewhere. 

Bobby Riley is the principal of Integrated Arts Academy, Burlington, Vermont and the 2016 National Distinguished Principal for Vermont, honored by the National Association of Elementary School Principals. Cheri Sterman is the Director of Education for Crayola and on the Executive Board of the Partnership for 21^st Century Learning. In this column, they write, "As more schools across the country experiment with personalized learning approaches to better meet the needs, goals and interests of individual learners, many are overlooking an important piece: arts integration. That’s one reason the Integrated Arts Academy of Burlington, Vermont, got together with Crayola’s art-focused professional learning programs, channeling resources to identify reasons why infusing arts into other subjects can make personalized learning programs more effective. The Academy is a magnet elementary school is located in a U.S. State Department Refugee Resettlement Area that houses families from dozens of nations."

Playing chess is a big deal at Killip Elementary in Flagstaff, AZ. The whole program started as a safe place for kids to come after school — a diversion — but this week dozens of those students are getting ready to head out to Nashville, Tenn., to compete with about 5,000 other young people at the SuperNationals of chess. The competition only happens every four years and the last time the team went, they placed a team at third in the nation.

School districts around the nation have passed resolutions vowing to do everything they can to protect undocumented students. Now, a University of Missouri researcher examines how individual schools can meet the needs of students and families when the threat of deportation or detainment hit close to home.

Schools of Opportunity is the brainchild of Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a professor specializing in educational policy and law, and Carol Burris, a former award-winning principal in New York who is now executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education. It was launched a few years ago to highlight public high schools that actively seek to close opportunity gaps through research-proven practices and not standardized test scores. As described below, three of Silver Schools of Opportunity this past year demonstrate how curriculum and instruction can meet the needs of diverse student populations. Oakland International High School, Ossining High School and Washington Technology Magnet School all have closed opportunity gaps by thoughtfully embracing their students and their communities.

The Los Angeles Unified School Board — which runs the second largest school system in the country — just toughened its commitment to protect undocumented immigrant students and their families from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. As cities and towns around the country move to protect immigrant families from federal agents, Los Angeles school board members unanimously passed a new resolution Tuesday that reaffirms that ICE agents will not be allowed to come onto school campuses until the superintendent and district attorneys agree in advance. It also bars district employees from cooperating with ICE on immigration cases.