ELL News Headlines

She's a young student in Afghanistan who graduated high school 3 years early at age 15. For years, she's dreamed of becoming an engineer, both to rebuild her country and to prove that women could work in what's often seen there as a male field. M.H., who requested anonymity fearing Taliban reprisal for speaking to the press and criticizing their policy, was inches from reaching her goal this past December. But days after she completed requirements for a civil engineering degree, the Taliban banned women from universities.

As we commemorate the lives and history of Black peoples in the United States this February, SLJ has curated lists of fiction and nonfiction books that can be paired in the classroom to offer a nuanced presentation of major historical events of Black history.

NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks to authors Grace Lin and Kate Messner about their new children's book. "Once Upon a Book" follows a young girl who discovers the joy of reading.

The demographics of public school students are changing rapidly, including in the South. That means school districts must find ways to meet the needs of an increasingly Hispanic and multilingual student body, researchers and advocates say. In Alabama, for instance, the mostly Hispanic English-learner population grew from about 2.4 percent to about 5 percent in the last 10 years. In the Russellville school district in the northern part of the state, English learners now make up a quarter of the student population.

Spend an hour with Cheriese Gipson, and you can't help but get a sense of what she’s like as a preschool teacher. She starts to explain a favorite lesson about mittens and animals, then pauses, disappears off the Zoom screen, then pops back up with a puppet on her hand to continue the discussion. After lunch, one of the 4-year-olds returning to Gipson's classroom pokes her head onto the screen, wanting a hug and a look at whom Gipson is talking to. Speaking in Spanish, Gipson explains that she needs a few more minutes to wrap up the interview.

Over the last decade, the town of Russellville, Ala., has seen a huge growth in its Spanish-speaking population. A quarter of all students in the Russellville City Schools district are English learners. And in the last ten years, the percentage of English-learner students statewide has doubled. In response, the Russellville school district has created a robust English-learner program and hired 10 bilingual aides, funded largely by pandemic relief dollars.

Students want teachers who are emotionally present, empathetic to their experiences and who invest in their well-being and success. Teachers crave those same things — empathy, support and investment — from families, school and district leaders and the public. In my experience, there's an empathy gap for teachers. What I didn’t recognize or acknowledge is that this has created an empathy gap for students as well. That’s a realization I didn’t come to until hearing a student’s perspective on the issue.

Communities In Schools, the national organization that provides wraparound services to students in high-poverty schools, will receive up to $165 million from the Ballmer Group, the largest gift in the organization's 45-year history. The latest gift from the Ballmer Group, which was founded by Connie and Steve Ballmer, will go toward taking the Communities In Schools' student-support model to 1,000 more schools, both in new locations and in places where the organization already operates. Steve Ballmer is the former Microsoft CEO.

Roxana Alvarado Martinéz, a high school sophomore, had told only close friends she was seeing a therapist to help her with anxiety and insomnia. But that changed last month in the civics classroom where she serves as a teacher’s assistant. The teacher plucked slips of paper from the “Sol y Nubes” — sun and clouds — box, where students can anonymously share struggles or excitement. That day, as the discussion touched on depression, bullying, and suicide, Roxana spoke up.

Anthony Vargas listened intently as a young student launched into her presentation on the Navajo Code Talkers, a group of American Indians trained and recruited to relay secret messages in battles during World War II. Vargas, the district's supervisor of gifted and talented and advanced programs, understands all too well the importance of recognizing the talent and value of historically underrepresented groups. It's why he's worked diligently over the last four years to increase the number of Hispanic students and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in the district's gifted and talented program, which skewed white and upper income even as students of color and those from low-income households made up a majority of the district's enrollment.