ELL News Headlines

Every Wednesday, a group of fourth graders at Winchester Elementary put on black aprons and start packing up cardboard boxes with canned vegetables and mac and cheese. The young volunteers spend their free periods prepping weekend meal boxes for around 30 Whitehaven families who line up outside the Memphis school building each Friday afternoon. It’s a routine that’s been in place since Winchester opened its food pantry in March.

Would you be able to pass a U.S. citizenship test on America’s government and history? This week, it got harder.

Lucia Ortíz trudges through endless fields of cempasuchil flowers, the luminescent orange petals of which will soon cloak everything from city streets to cemeteries across Mexico. Here, in the winding canals and farms on the fringes of Mexico City, the flower also known as the Mexican marigold has been farmed for generations, and takes the spotlight every year in the country’s Day of the Dead celebrations.

Today’s post from Larry Ferlazzo's Classroom Q&A is the latest in a series in which educators share potential challenges that might exist in teaching English learners and how to respond to them.

Beginning Nov. 1, more than 65,000 children will be at risk of losing access to Head Start, the federal early-learning program for low-income families. That's because federal funding for individual Head Start programs cannot be disbursed while the government is shut down.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore funding for grants that are meant to bolster school-based mental health care and were created in response to the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Every morning, Arely Solis packs healthy lunches and snacks to fuel her as a full-time student at East Los Angeles College. Thanks to federal food assistance, she says she can focus on her studies rather than on where her next meal is coming from. That will change on Saturday, Nov. 1, when the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal program that helps feed low-income families, will be delayed indefinitely for the first time in its history.

In recent years, Texas has received national attention for being one of the first states to ban all diversity, equity and inclusion programs in colleges and for ending in-state tuition rates for undocumented students. At the same time, the state has seen the number of first-generation college applicants more than triple in the last five years. Many of them are Hispanic. 

California education officials are tasked with a difficult mission over the next few months — finding the best way to figure out which 4-year-olds need extra help learning English.

Devan Chopra is reading to a pre-school classroom in Grafton, West Virginia. She's holding up the book Pete the Cat. "I'm here because I really want to spread the love of reading," she said. The high school junior came to this Head Start program at the Webster Pre School as a volunteers with the LiTEArary Society, an international group started in West Virginia that gets new picture books to preschool children to develop a love of reading.