ELL News Headlines

Edna Chavez knows what it was like to flee her country alone as a teenager. She knows what it was like to make the risky and lonely trek north, to cross the border illegally and be held as an unaccompanied minor in shelters and detention centers. But the 21-year-old student considers herself among a lucky few, because later she was adopted. Chavez has met many students with similar backgrounds, but who have no path to citizenship, who have limited education or work prospects, and who have endured discrimination. Chavez wants to do something about it.

The pandemic led to a rapid rise in screen time among kids while the vast majority of them engaged in full-time remote or hybrid learning. But as COVID-19 restrictions lifted and students returned to in-person instruction, the time they spent in front of screens didn’t come back down as expected, according to newly released research supported by the National Institutes of Health and published in the journal Pediatrics. Those elevated levels of screen time persisted for more than one year after the pandemic forced mass school building closures nationwide.

Some students in town will soon have an opportunity to learn subjects in two languages at once, as Oregon Trail Elementary School is poised to introduce a dual-immersion program in the fall.

When teenagers become pregnant, their odds of making it to graduation drop nearly 40 percentage points below that of their non-parenting peers, according to data cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One charter school system in New Orleans is working to address that disparity.

The statistics are sobering. In the past year, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls reports seriously considering suicide. One in 5 teens identifying as LGBTQ+ say they attempted suicide in that time. Between 2009 and 2019, depression rates doubled for all teens. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The question is: Why now? "Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving together to shape human development for millennia... Within the last twenty years, the advent of portable technology and social media platforms is changing what took 60,000 years to evolve," Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association (APA), told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. "We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development."

Dan Santat and the late Jerry Pinkney draw from life (literally) in their memoirs for young readers.

Less than a third of undocumented students who apply for state financial aid in California for college enroll and receive the help, according to a new report from the California Student Aid Commission. Only 14% of the state’s more than 94,000 undocumented college students receive financial aid, the 2020-21 data shows.

When this school year began, Issac Moreno just couldn't get himself to go. During the pandemic, he'd gotten used to learning from his family's home in Los Angeles. Then, last fall, he started junior high, five days a week, in person. The last fully normal school year Issac remembers is third grade. Now, he's in seventh, with multiple classes each day, a busier schedule and new classmates. Issac's mother, Jessica Moreno, says it's been a struggle to get Issac back into the routine of going to school.

As New York City continues to grapple with youth mental health challenges, Mayor Eric Adams laid out a sweeping vision on Thursday to help schools better recognize student mental health needs and create a safety net for kids in crisis. 

English learners are one of the fastest growing student populations in the country, yet the number of specialized educators for them is lagging behind. The number of certified licensed English learner instructors decreased by about 10.4 percent between the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years, according to the latest federal data available. The national English learner population grew by 2.6 percent in the same time period.