ELL News Headlines

In the Cuba, N.M., school district, where one-third of the 741 students are homeless, the creation of a community school district was a response to vast needs. The three-school district — elementary, middle and high school — is 79 percent Native American and 20 percent Latino. In 2018, 62 percent of the students graduated high school. But the state of New Mexico, which has long struggled with chronic absenteeism and poor academic achievement, has embraced community schools. The concept, which more districts are adopting since the pandemic highlighted the central role of neighborhood schools, involves, among other things, integrating nonprofits, businesses and colleges on the school site to offer services to students and their families.

We know students need support from schools and their families to cope with academic and mental health challenges. We’ve seen over and over that children’s academic learning can’t be separated from their social and emotional lives. In the wake of pandemic disruptions to schooling, it’s more important than ever for families and educators to come together and form meaningful partnerships that nurture children’s social, emotional, and academic development.

In the multiverse of superheroes, some comic book and graphic novel creators are using Latina characters to challenge real-life issues. New Yorker Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez created La Borinqueña, a Puerto Rican superhero who crusades for issues affecting the Caribbean island – including climate change, economic displacement, renewable energy and Black Lives Matter.

Diwali, a holiday known as the "Festival of Lights" and celebrated primarily in South Asia and the Caribbean, will become an official school holiday in New York City, local leadership announced Thursday.

More than half of 2,500 students in the small Russellville, AL city school district identify as Hispanic or Latino, and about a quarter are still learning English —known as EL students. But the district at times has struggled to find the people and money necessary to help EL students achieve. It typically takes five years of intensive, small-group instruction, on top of regular classes, to help a student learn English and perform well in a regular classroom. 

At exactly 1:30:46 p.m. Tuesday, a group of students on Detroit’s east side made radio contact with an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, a notable feat for one of the country’s few high schools to offer an aviation curriculum. 

In Florida, Lee County’s 94 schools and programs, which educate more the 90,000 students, shuttered the day before Ian Hurricane hit, hallways emptying of students and, in some places, filling with evacuees who slept on the tile floors to wait out the hurricane. Out of the classroom, young people were severed from cafeterias — where every child in the district eats breakfast and lunch free — and classrooms and counselors.

Students were not allowed to speak Spanish at school. That was the rule that teachers instituted at a small West Texas schoolhouse near the United States-Mexico border in the 1950s, even though Spanish was the native language for many of the Mexican-American children there. The Blackwell School in tiny Marfa, Texas, was just one of many segregated schools across the southwest where Hispanic children were taught separately from their white peers. Now, the old adobe building is set to become a national historic site that supporters say will explore the often untold story of how school segregation played out in this corner of the U.S. The moment is the culmination of years of work by Blackwell alumni to preserve the school's history and to obtain formal recognitions for the site.

Teaching current events isn’t just for social studies. From exploring how the coronavirus vaccine works to studying how wildfires affect communities, it’s increasingly a focus in science, too.