ELL News Headlines

A Spanish teacher at Wood River Middle School in Hailey has been tabbed as Idaho's 2021 Teacher of the Year. Superintendent of Public Instruction Sherri Ybarra surprised Jorge Pulleiro with the award Tuesday morning.

The overall attendance rate for first graders in Los Angeles Unified is down 3.7% compared to a year ago — and down by two or three times that rate for some of the highest-needs students — according to the latest data from the district. Cumulative attendance rates since the start of the school year show a 7.5% drop in attendance among Black students and a 4.1% decrease among Latino students in the first grade. The rates also went down by 4.2% for English learners, 4% for students with disabilities, 9.6% for foster youths and 13.5% for homeless students.

Birmingham has a vibrant (and growing) Latinx community. In these interviews, four Birminghamians talk about what their Hispanic Heritage means to them.

Authors Nicola Yoon (The Sun is Also a Star) and David Yoon (Frankly in Love) are launching Joy Revolution, a romance imprint that will be written by people of color and feature the stories of people of color. The first titles will be released in 2022.

In many parts of the developing world, school closures put children on the streets. Families are desperate for money. Children are an easy source of cheap labor. While the United States and other developed countries debate the effectiveness of online schooling, hundreds of millions of children in poorer countries lack computers or the internet and have no schooling at all. United Nations officials estimate that at least 24 million children will drop out and that millions could be sucked into work. Ten-year-olds are now mining sand in Kenya.

While almost 7 in 10 Latino parents prefer to start the school year remotely because of the coronavirus, over 80 percent worry their kids will fall behind.

Three years ago, teacher Kerri Landry found a hole in the wall of her middle-school classroom in Coventry, Rhode Island. It looked strange, so Landry took a flash photo of the inside of the hole — and captured a troubling image. "The entire inside of that wall was all black mold, the entire thing," she told Business Insider. Landry's school isn't exceptional: Research shows that air quality is a major issue in tens of thousands of schools across the US. A June report from the Government Accountability Office estimated that 41% of districts nationwide, or 36,000 schools, need major upgrades to their HVAC systems. Before the pandemic, poor air quality in schools was problematic because it impeded kids' learning and lowered their test scores. But now, faulty HVAC systems are even more concerning since they could facilitate the spread of the coronavirus. 

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with former U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera about his latest collection, Every Day We Get More Illegal.

During a time of uncertainty, a Duluth woman is hoping to offer some sense of relief and relaxation with a cultural twist. Pelayo is a proud Latina from Mexico who has been teaching yoga for 13 years. This month she is offering 'Bilingual Yoga' classes for the remainder of Hispanic Heritage Month.