ELL News Headlines

Better data collection and resources for schools serving “newcomers” — students who are new to the U.S and who may or may not speak English — are being planned, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition said in a recent letter to a leader of a coalition of educators, researchers and advocacy organizations.

Michele Bergeron knows that her 5-year-old son, who’s deaf, likes watermelon and pizza. He’s obsessed with airplanes, wants to play football, likes books about Spider-Man and someday wants to be tall like his dad. Her son, Lennon, attends California School for the Deaf in Fremont, a public K-12 school for deaf and hard-of-hearing students from throughout Northern California. Students as young as 14 months learn to sign at the same time they learn to read and write in English, which allows them to master both languages and communicate with their deaf peers and the hearing world alike.

A severe teacher shortage has forced dozens of preschools in California to shut down some of their classrooms since the start of the school year. The funding for these subsidized classrooms is available, and plenty of children from lower-income families are waiting to enroll. But there aren’t enough teachers — a situation that could get worse as the state begins to pour billions of dollars into transitional kindergarten, threatening to destabilize the early education workforce.

There are 574 federally recognized Indian tribes in the contiguous 48 states and Alaska and more than 600 tribes in Canada, including First Nations People, Métis, and Inuit. In Canada and the United States alone, over a thousand languages are spoken. Each band has its own identity, customs, and stories. The following compilations offer an inside look into some of these Indigenous peoples and their rich and varied cultures. Many of these anthologies present fictional stories inspired by the creators’ backgrounds, but others are true tales handed down through generations. Others are collective biographies of important Native American figures everyone should know. Gathered from northernmost Canada to the Mayan of Central America, these works are only a selection of the stories that exist within the Native community. They take place in the past, but also the future, to emphasize that Native peoples have been, are still, and will always be an active and indelible part our complex story.

It’s been clear to Richmond High School junior Angelee Montances that when it comes to arts and music education, all things are not created equal in Richmond.

Recently, the cities of Dearborn and Hamtramck in Michigan, began providing ballots in Arabic for the first time in the state’s history.

Hazel Elementary School held a successful ESL (English as a second language) event on Oct. 27, providing an opportunity for the Hazel community to gain knowledge and obtain tools and resources to help their children succeed at school and at home.

At the start of school last year, Olga Cruz was worried to learn that Berkshire Hills Regional School District was about to hold its first three assemblies — one for each school — in Spanish. “I thought that maybe something bad was happening,” said Cruz, who has lived in Great Barrington for eight years. “I didn't think that it was because there was going to be support for [the kids] at school.” But that’s indeed what it was: A move by the district to better serve students and families of non-native English speakers.

Florida Atlantic University’s College of Education in collaboration with the School District of Osceola County (SDOC) has received a $1.8 million grant from the United States Department of Education’s Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) for a five year project titled “PRAISE, Preparing for Readiness and Academic Improvement for pre-School English Learners.” PRAISE is designed to improve the quality of instruction for English language learners and enhance educators’ ability to support preschool English language learners’ readiness for kindergarten. FAU is one of 44 institutions  nationwide selected to receive this grant in 2022.

Samantha Sencer-Mura easily won her election Tuesday to represent south Minneapolis in the state House. She will be the first Japanese-American to serve in the Minnesota Legislature. In an interview before the election, she told Sahan Journal that funding education is a top priority. “Increasing teachers of color, funding full-service community schools, making sure that special education and English language learners are being supported: those are all things that teachers are asking for—begging for,” she said. “And I think, especially with everything that schools and teachers have been through over the last few years, I think those needs really need to be centered.”