ELL News Headlines

Katrina pummeled New Orleans at the very beginning of the 2005-06 school year — leaving most of the city’s public school buildings damaged, some of them beyond repair. A few city schools reopened within months, but it would take years for others to welcome back students. By that point, the school system looked very different.

Schools across the country are increasing security, reassuring their communities of their safety plans, and providing mental health resources in response to a deadly shooting at a Minneapolis school on Wednesday.

As details of the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis continue to emerge, parents face the difficult task of discussing the event with their children.

The books in this list don’t just provide stories — they provide first contact with literacy itself. They tell children, “Words matter. Stories matter. You matter.”

Each fall, one of the first routines I introduce is our classroom job board. It’s more than a list of tasks—it helps students feel that they belong and have real roles in our shared space. Over the years, I’ve expanded beyond classic jobs like Line Leader and Pencil Sharpener to include creative roles with quirky titles that engage and resonate with students.

Illinois lawmakers passed a new law that codifies the right of undocumented students to receive a free, public education, and requires school districts to adopt clear policies protecting students from immigration enforcement activities in schools.

The Trump administration is refusing to defend a lawsuit challenging a federal program that provides $350 million in grant funding to colleges with large populations of Hispanic students, a move that threatens the future of similar programs to help minority students.

When it was originally passed in 2001, the Texas Dream Act was intended not only to increase access to higher education for undocumented students but was also meant to bolster Texas’s economy and its workforce long-term. With that law, Texas became the first of more than two dozen states to implement in-state tuition for undocumented students, and for nearly 24 years, the landmark policy remained intact. In June, the Texas attorney general’s office and the Trump administration worked together to end the provisions in a state law that had offered thousands of undocumented students lower in-state tuition rates at Texas public colleges.

<ore than 3.6 million children born in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic are walking into elementary schools across the country this fall. They're children who came into a world full of masked adults dousing themselves in hand sanitizer. Many spent the first year of their lives either in isolation in lockdowns or with only a handful of trusted people in their bubbles. And the long-term impact on these "COVID kindergartners" remains unclear.

The students of Bethune Academy reflect the larger population of their Milwaukee, WI, community: The PreK–8 school is home to a large refugee population from countries such as Myanmar and Malaysia, and many students are raised in households that speak ­Burmese, Rohingya, or Karen. Around 40 percent of the school’s students are ­English Language Learners (ELLs), which is a key factor in how they engage with the school library.