ELL News Headlines

A father separated from his family by a Trump administration immigration policy was finally able to return to the U.S. last month, after almost four years. When José Luis Ruiz Arévalos left the U.S. in May 2019, he thought he would be gone six days. Instead, he was forced to stay out of the country for almost four years. His absence created emotional and financial burdens for his entire family and derailed some of his children’s college plans.

Years ago, when I was still coaching high school cross country, a teenage girl skipped up to me after practice with a warning: Don’t count on her to race all the time. If her nerves got too intense before races, she might have to bow out in advance. “I have anxiety!” she explained with a nervous grin. 

Growing up in Amman, Jordan, Luma Mufleh had an unusual role model: Dolly Parton. Watching Parton play a secretary who teams up with two coworkers to get the better of their bully of a boss in the 1980 movie “9 to 5" inspired Mufleh’s own sense of resilience as a young immigrant, and later an educator.

“You Are Here: Connecting Flights,” a story collection edited by Ellen Oh, contends not only with racist aggressions, but also with cultural expectations and adolescent insecurities.

When he'd go outside at recess, John Buettner would dream of learning the monkey-bars. The fifth-grader uses a wheelchair, so they aren't accessible to him—in fact, most of the playground at Glen Lake Elementary School isn't. Meanwhile, Betsy Julien would look out from her classroom window as she ate lunch, at the students in their wheelchairs, and thought, "Our playground is not set up for everybody in the school to play and have fun." Julien's own son is a third-grader at Glen Lake, in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins, and he uses a wheelchair, too. "So, this dream and passion of being able to have an accessible piece of equipment has been with me for a long time." Now, thanks to this teacher and her students, that dream is about to come true in a bigger way than she ever imagined.

In 1986, the federal government mandated that states provide therapy for newborns and toddlers with developmental delays and disabilities, but the program has been dogged by severe racial gaps in access and quality since its inception.

Over the past couple of years, Sacramento has become a home to diasporas from all over the world — from Afghanistan following the chaotic and deadly U.S. withdrawal, leaving the country under Taliban control, to Ukraine, which has just entered its second year of the war. There are many other examples from Syria to Latin America, just to name a few of the people and families fleeing their homeland for safety and abruptly uprooted as refugees.

The last few years have been a strain on nearly everyone, with routines disrupted, social interactions curtailed, and stress and anxiety running high. There’s been much written and discussed about how those challenges have impacted students in K-12 schools and colleges — how they're suffering in the wake of the pandemic and experiencing alarmingly high rates of mental health concerns. But what about kids who are even younger — infants, toddlers and preschool-aged children who also lived through the pandemic and are not immune to the stressors that it caused?

The need to get kids moving has become more urgent in the last few years. U.S. children and adolescents get 17 fewer minutes a day of even moderate exercise today than they did before 2020. And the drops in exercise were especially pronounced among students in poverty.

At 13, she was too young to be cleaning a meatpacking plant in the heart of Nebraska cattle country, working the graveyard shift amid the brisket saws and the bone cutters. The cleaning company broke the law when it hired her and more than two dozen other teenagers in this gritty industrial town, federal officials said. Since the U.S. Department of Labor raided the plant in October, Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor hired to clean the facility, has been fined for violating child labor laws. The girl, meanwhile, has watched her whole life unravel.