ELL News Headlines

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.

These books highlight traditions from Holi, the Hindu festival of colors.

The English learner population is growing but the number of specialized instructors for them and training for general education teachers who work with them is lagging. Researchers and educators say professional development for all teachers and school leaders rooted in best practices for English learners is needed to fill in the gap.

Edna Chavez knows what it was like to flee her country alone as a teenager. She knows what it was like to make the risky and lonely trek north, to cross the border illegally and be held as an unaccompanied minor in shelters and detention centers. But the 21-year-old student considers herself among a lucky few, because later she was adopted. Chavez has met many students with similar backgrounds, but who have no path to citizenship, who have limited education or work prospects, and who have endured discrimination. Chavez wants to do something about it.

The pandemic led to a rapid rise in screen time among kids while the vast majority of them engaged in full-time remote or hybrid learning. But as COVID-19 restrictions lifted and students returned to in-person instruction, the time they spent in front of screens didn’t come back down as expected, according to newly released research supported by the National Institutes of Health and published in the journal Pediatrics. Those elevated levels of screen time persisted for more than one year after the pandemic forced mass school building closures nationwide.

Some students in town will soon have an opportunity to learn subjects in two languages at once, as Oregon Trail Elementary School is poised to introduce a dual-immersion program in the fall.

When teenagers become pregnant, their odds of making it to graduation drop nearly 40 percentage points below that of their non-parenting peers, according to data cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One charter school system in New Orleans is working to address that disparity.

The statistics are sobering. In the past year, nearly 1 in 3 teen girls reports seriously considering suicide. One in 5 teens identifying as LGBTQ+ say they attempted suicide in that time. Between 2009 and 2019, depression rates doubled for all teens. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic. The question is: Why now? "Our brains, our bodies, and our society have been evolving together to shape human development for millennia... Within the last twenty years, the advent of portable technology and social media platforms is changing what took 60,000 years to evolve," Mitch Prinstein, the chief science officer at the American Psychological Association (APA), told the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. "We are just beginning to understand how this may impact youth development."