ELL News Headlines

Teachers and parents have always faced a tough balancing act when it comes to the children in our care. How much of our job is to shield them from the ugly parts of the world, and how much is to help them learn, process, and prepare for that ugliness?

This COVID-19 comic is based on interviews conducted by NPR's Cory Turner with Tara Powell at the University of Illinois School of Social Work, Joy Osofsky at the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, Krystal Lewis at the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown's School of Public Health and Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president of curriculum and content at Sesame Workshop.

Wondering how to keep your kids healthy, happy and learning during the quarantine? Longtime bilingual children's music maker José-Luis Orozco has you covered.

Latino high school students in Wellington, Fla. are taking the initiative to address educational challenges posted by the COVID-19 pandemic by providing a helping hand to elementary students struggling to read in English. It is part of a partnership between Wellington High School and Latinos in Action, a nonprofit program that encourages young Latinos to make a change in their communities.

Danielle Colayco starts every day talking to her 5-year-old daughter, Audrey, in Tagalog. She greets her good morning, asks her some simple questions and tells her that she loves her. The second-generation Filipina American grew up in Southern California, not knowing a word of her family’s language. But during quarantine, she started taking weekly online Tagalog classes through the program Tagalog With Kirby, while her daughter participates virtually through TagalogKids.com.

Lynette Stant teaches third grade in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian community in Arizona. For our Learning Curve series, she shares what a week of virtual learning is like.

The magnitude of the crisis facing President Biden at the U.S.-Mexico border came into clearer focus Wednesday as the new administration was holding record numbers of unaccompanied migrant teens and children in detention cells for far longer than legally allowed and federal health officials fell further behind in their race to find space for them in shelters.

So-called "learning pods" cropped up across the country in primarily white, wealthy neighborhoods last year as the pandemic first brought schools to a close. In more recent months, several organizations in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods in Boston have pulled together to offer similar options to their local students. Amanda Fernández, co-founder of Latinos for Education, and Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, executive director of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, joined Jim Braude to talk about one such effort in Boston.

The Biden administration wants to use the Federal Emergency Management Agency in South Texas to help cope with the growing number of migrant adults and children crossing from Mexico, according to two people familiar with the proposal. FEMA support in Texas would be primarily aimed at testing and potentially quarantining family groups and adults before their release from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The number of apprehensions made along the Mexico border has pushed even higher over the past week, with agents taking more than 4,000 people into custody every day — a level of enforcement activity that nears the 2019 crisis.