ELL News Headlines

The Sesame Workshop hopes the friendly faces of Sesame Street characters will help refugee children navigate the complex social and emotional effects of trauma and displacement. The organization is teaming with the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian organization, to "deliver transformative early learning and social-emotional support to millions of refugee children in Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria," it said in a news release Thursday.

Anna Dearlove, a 2nd grade teacher at Glen Park Elementary School in San Francisco, introduces academic language to prepare English-language learners for their science investigations. Students work in pairs and make claims about variations in plants and animals.

Despite pleas for kids to attend school, Grand Rapids Public Schools said around 4,200 students weren't in class due to a "Day Without Immigrants" protest. It looked likely that district wouldn’t reach its threshold of 75% student attendance and the day would count as a snow day.

As schools work to implement the Next Generation Science Standards, practicing scientists are also rethinking how they work with schools to advance understanding of their field. The National Board on Science Education, part of the National Academies of Science, brought together science educators and members of professional science groups like the American Chemical Society last month to discuss guidance for developing partnerships between scientists and teachers.

It's Sunday afternoon and a half dozen middle school students are gathered with their parents for a class in the basement at Olivet Presbyterian Church and Mission in Cedar Rapids. This is "Juntos" — or "Together" — a class offered by Iowa State University Extension that aims to teach Latino families how to navigate Iowa's school system and students how to be successful in high school and beyond.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, is calling on the nation's big-city mayors to set up safe havens for immigrants after federal agents arrested nearly 700 undocumented residents in a series of raids conducted over the past week. Child advocates say the recent immigration sweeps and future actions on immigration policy by the Trump administration could disrupt home lives, separate families, and have a "chilling effect" on children and communities.

The Department of Education waited more than a week to send home a letter to Spanish-speaking parents at a dual-language Inwood school about their water's lead levels found during a recent test — blaming the principal for not asking for a translated version. On Feb. 6, parents at the P.S./I.S. 176 campus, which houses Muscota New School and Amistad Dual Language School at 4862 Broadway, got a letter in their children's backpacks that the school had shown elevated levels of lead in a dozen water samples taken from classrooms, bathrooms, kitchen faucets and water fountains — including some as high as 450 times the federal threshold. The letter was written in English — despite the fact that Amistad is a dual-language school and that many parents and students at Muscota speak Spanish.

A push by Republicans in Congress to overturn accountability regulations for the Every Student Succeeds Act could have far-reaching consequences for how the law works in states, and the potential end of the much-contested rules is dividing the education community. Groups supporting the move argue that it would free schools from unnecessary burdens, while opponents contend that overturning the rules could hurt vulnerable students and create turmoil in states and districts trying to finalize their transition to ESSA, the 2015 law that replaced the No Child Left Behind Act.

Giovanna Munoz Ortiz is a 10th grader at Madison Park Academy, and every day, she learns to code. Her public school in East Oakland, Calif., mirrors the neighborhood that surrounds it. It's nearly entirely Latino and African American. Almost all the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. And, until 2015, it didn't offer any computer science classes. "I had never really thought about it much before," Ortiz, 15, says. "Now that I am being exposed to it, I find it really interesting." Ortiz is one of a growing number of students from underrepresented backgrounds gaining access for the first time to curriculum from Code.org, which gives them the knowledge and skills to pursue an education and career in computer science.

Austin Discovery School office manager and registrar Deborah Freeman dropped off a student at home after school this week to help out his parents, who were afraid of leaving their house — they feared they could get deported if they were to cross paths with the federal immigration officials who had set up shop just a couple of miles away from the school. Wanting to learn more about how she can help, Freeman was one of about 120 educators and other school officials who attended a “Know Your Rights” training session at Becker Elementary on Saturday. The training session, which was hosted by teachers’ labor group Education Austin, came a day after it was confirmed that immigration officials were carrying out a new operation in Central and South Texas to capture unauthorized immigrants with criminal records.