ELL News Headlines

As the Trump administration aggressively ramps up deportations of undocumented immigrants, some K-12 leaders have pledged to protect the rights and privacy of students who don't have legal immigration status. Some vow schools are "sanctuaries" where educators won't cooperate with authorities to identify or take action against undocumented students and families. But the fast-moving, politically charged situation has also created confusion for educators about what they can and can't do.

More than 180 school district and school administrators, teachers, teaching assistants and instructional support staff recently spent the day at Niagara University for a Multilingual Matters conference. Among the topics covered during the event were parent engagement, cooperative learning strategies, co-teaching models, instructional technology, and requirements and supports for English language learners.

In response to President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, the California School Boards Association has released legal guidance and sample resolution and policies that address the rights of undocumented K-12-students. The association released the information as district leaders question what they can to do "uphold their obligation to serve all students, regardless of immigration status," a press release from the association reads.

New York City will add a slate of bilingual programs, officials announced Tuesday, in an effort to support English learners and nurture immigrant families in the city's public schools. The new programs are a combination of 39 dual-language programs, which provide classroom instruction in both English and another language, and 29 transitional bilingual education programs, which gradually switch instruction from a student’s native language to English.

The nine o'clock hour in Samantha Poe’s classroom means one thing to her students. It’s time to write. "Let's find our spots!" she said energetically to her class as they filed into her room. "Can we start writing our letters, please?" Poe teaches English language learners, or ELL students, at Montebello Elementary in west Phoenix and her class is pretty diverse, with kids from nine different language backgrounds.

Schools across the United States often provide substandard instruction and social-emotional support to the nation's English-language learners—and fail to properly train the educators who teach them, a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finds.

As anxiety increases within the immigrant community over stepped-up enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border, one small bi-national community in New Mexico is working hard to keep families connected through education and schooling. Special correspondent Simon Thompson reports from public media's Fronteras Desk and PBS station KRWG.

Texas schools have added more than 300,000 bilingual students in the past decade and have budgeted for 6,000 fewer full-time employee equivalents certified to teach them, according to the most recent data from the Texas Education Agency captured in The Texas Tribune's Texas Public Schools Explorer. 

In order to combat some of the challenges in keeping English language learners engaged, educators at San Francisco International High School (SFIHS) are trying a different approach. SFIHS teachers have found that their students are more motivated to engage with content — and practice English — when they work in groups that include speakers of many different first languages on authentic discussions or problems.

Boston Public Schools has launched a website to inform its immigrant students and their families of their rights in an "effort to reaffirm support for immigrants and embrace students of all cultural backgrounds." The website offers information in 15 languages on a range of immigration issues. Students and families can learn of their rights and find scholarship information for unauthorized immigrant students, a hate-crime hot line, support for Muslim families, and educational tools for teachers on how to engage in civics conversations in the classroom.