ELL News Headlines

The University of Arizona announced Monday that Native American students no longer would have to pay tuition or fees at its main campus in Tucson. The university hopes the new program better serves the state's large Native population. The program, a first of its kind in an Arizona public university, will be available for students registered to any of the state's 22 federally recognized tribes. More than 400 current students will be eligible at the school's main campus in Tucson, where tuition currently is $12,700 per semester.

It took Maggie Przytulinski seven years to get her younger brother, Mark, the help he needed in school. Przytulinski said Mark, who has autism, Down syndrome, and is non-verbal, had an Individualized Education Program, or IEP, a legally binding document that outlines the services for students with disabilities. It requires multiple meetings every year and a significant amount of legal paperwork.  Adding to the complexity? Przytulinski’s Polish-speaking mother knows only basic English.  Przytulinski, who speaks both English and Polish, said she often found herself taking on the role of translator in the IEP process. That should no longer be the case, thanks to a legal settlement reached earlier this month between Chicago Public Schools and a group of families, including Przytulinski’s. It will guarantee language interpretation services to the families of students with disabilities. The Illinois State Board of Education reached a similar settlement late last year. 

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program has allowed hundreds of thousands of eligible young people whose immigrant parents brought them to the United States to get benefits such as a Social Security card, driver’s license and two-year work permit. It also opened the door for many to go to college. Still, DACA’s impact has always been tempered by uncertainty.

During the summer, Larry Ferlazzo is sharing thematic posts bringing together responses on similar topics from the past 11 years. You can see all those collections from the first 10 years here. Today’s theme is Schools and the Coronavirus Crisis.

Forty years after Vincent Chin’s murder in Detroit, even amid a rise of anti-Asian American attacks in the past two years, his legacy is largely unfamiliar outside of – and sometimes even within – Asian American circles. Once they’re aware of the case, however, students are quick to make connections to the present day.

When Rosa Beltran was going through high school in the late ’90s in a small town in southern Colorado, she never expected to graduate. Beltran dropped out and became a teen mom. But she determined her children would finish school. “It was always instilled to me, I’m going to graduate, I’m going to go to college,” her oldest daughter Marisa, now 25, said. “There was no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”  Marisa Beltran graduated from Pueblo in 2015, during a decade when Colorado’s Hispanic graduation rate rose nearly 20 percentage points, double the gain for all students, and faster than for any other demographic. 

On a recent morning in teacher Geri Ross's classroom at Marion Elementary School, second graders sat at clusters of desks, singing songs and reading stories in Spanish. The students have spent the past school year in a pilot class that is testing bilingual education in the Ritenour School District. Just across the river in Illinois, schools are required to provide bilingual education in some classrooms. But Missouri schools have found it difficult to start similar programs. As educators search for ways to help students who were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, Ritenour leaders say its pilot class has had a hugely positive effect on students’ confidence and their test scores.

Former English learners — students who were once ELs, and shed that status when they mastered English — often emerge as high achievers, matching or surpassing their peers’ performance in school and on standardized tests, including the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS.