ELL News Headlines

Heavy precipitation caused epic flooding in the Central Valley earlier this year, causing catastrophic damage to homes and crops. Months later, the region is still recovering.

Recently arrived migrant families on Chicago’s West Side will get help with enrolling in school, receiving free school supplies, signing up for public benefits, and getting vaccinated at a new “welcome center” run by Chicago Public Schools and the city. 

When teachers and other authority figures in school constantly mispronounce students’ names, it can seriously affect their mental health and sense of identity. Names represent an individual’s identity, heritage, and culture, and taking the trouble to pronounce them correctly is one way teachers can show respect for students and their families. “When we empower our students’ voices and honor the language and cultural assets that they bring to schools, we will actualize our vision of creating an inclusive and respectful learning environment,” said Kelly Wylie, the director of the public affairs department for the Santa Clara County Office of Education, where thousands of students and teachers have taken a pledge to respect the names and identities of the county’s students, who speak more than 60 languages.

A 16-year-old boy from Guatemala died as a result of an on-the-job accident at a poultry plant in Mississippi, authorities said Tuesday. The victim, identified by local authorities and a family member as Duvan Tomas Perez, was a middle school student who arrived in this country from the town of Huispache about six years ago. NBC News reported last month that a federal investigation into Guatemalan children working in the U.S. in violation of child labor laws has expanded to include meatpacking and produce firms that have allegedly hired underage migrants in at least 11 states.

Across the nation’s middle, unhealthy air from Canadian wildfires sent summer campers home and left residents coughing, and asking when this would end.

If you’re enrolling your child in California state-subsidized preschool this fall, you’ll be asked new questions about what languages they speak and understand. It’s part of a new effort to identify which preschoolers speak languages other than English and make sure they’re supported to both keep those languages and learn English at the same time.

The U.S. Departments of Justice and Education are putting public schools on notice that immigrant children and youth are entitled to a free public education, regardless of their immigration status.

Assessments in K-12 schools have traditionally been designed with a monolingual English-speaking student in mind. But the English learner population, speaking a variety of home languages, continues to grow across the country. How effective, then, are traditional assessments in measuring what multilingual learners know in a given subject if they are limited to testing in English while they are still learning that language?

The Supreme Court on Thursday held that admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that relied in part on racial considerations violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, a historic ruling that will force a dramatic change in how the nation’s private and public universities select their students.

Georgianna McKenny's award-winning podcast begins, fittingly, with a blaring alarm. McKenny is the newly-announced high-school winner of NPR's fifth-annual Student Podcast Challenge. In a year with more than 3,300 entries – from middle- and high-schoolers in 48 states as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico – McKenny and her winning entry tell the story of the toll Jackson's water crisis has taken on the city's students.