ELL News Headlines

This year the Philadelphia school district is starting the school year later than normal. A decision that Oz Hill, the district's Chief Operating Officer, said was made to "reduce the likelihood that extreme temperatures would impact our ability to provide in-person instruction." As in many districts, school leaders in Philadelphia know that inadequate AC is a problem, but finding solutions can be complicated. Hitchner's school, for example, was supposed to get AC years ago.

Since the pandemic, nearly 16,000 early childhood programs have shuttered. Between January 2020 and January 2022, around 120,000 child care workers left the industry, many for higher paying jobs, leading to immense staffing shortages and soaring waiting lists for parents who were unable to return to work full-time due to a lack of care. Educators and experts say the federal relief aid prevented the situation from getting worse. Those funds helped keep more than 200,000 early childhood programs open and more than 1 million early childhood educators employed, thus allowing more than 9.5 million children to receive care. When the federal stabilization funds run out at the end of September and child care providers can no longer rely on this much-needed funding, experts say the consequences could be immense. A recent report by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, found an estimated 3.2 million children will eventually lose child care if those federal funds are not replaced.

Puerto Rico has seen a string of natural disasters in the past few years – hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and landslides. When COVID-19 hit in 2020, things got even worse.

Today’s post is the first in a series by the authors that will appear throughout the school year. Their posts will address the question: How can teachers support middle and high school challenged readers?

Sahira Larios is a public school kindergarten teacher in a bilingual Spanish-English classroom in Oak Grove School District in San Jose, California. In this interview, she describes how she builds strong partnerships with multilingual families.

Can acts of kindness make a difference in the lives of others? As an instructional technology coach, I have worked with fourth-grade teachers for the past seven years to transform abstract themes of empathy and compassion into concrete learning experiences.

For Bris Marcellus, the path to Boston was not straightforward. Economic reasons pushed him to flee his home country of Haiti to Brazil. But in Brazil racism made him flee again. Marcellus is just one of thousands of Haitian migrants who have arrived in Massachusetts over the past two years. Massachusetts is home to 80,000 Haitians — the third largest Haitian population in the United States — and over half of that population is estimated to live in the Boston area.

A new report released by the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center explores the role of Hispanic-serving community colleges in California and offers suggestions for how they could better serve Latino students.

The first week of school highlights yet another facet of the challenge Chicago faces in supporting newly arrived migrants: enrolling their children in school. For the past two days, I saw it up close while helping two migrant families enroll their daughters at a neighborhood high school in Brighton Park.

In my work with North Korean refugees and their children, I have found that the latter group, who are mostly born in hiding in China, naturally pick up Chinese during their time there. When these children escape China undetected and arrive in South Korea, they are faced with the daunting obstacle of assimilating to South Korean society. These children are uncomfortable with the fact that their first language is Chinese, their mother is North Korean, and their new life is in South Korea. While younger students may struggle with their Korean skills or Chinese accent, older students have learned to see their bilingualism as an asset rather than a barrier, pursuing careers such as interpretation, international trade, and politics, where it gives them an advantage as a unique spokesperson of South Korea, North Korea, and China.