English-language learners

Children of immigrants often face heritage language loss. St. Louis parents and community members are taking practical steps to maintain linguistic and cultural connection across generations.

As schools look for creative solutions to help students who are learning English, one local school district is exploring a teaching method that is popular in other parts of the country but has been slow to reach St. Louis.

During the pandemic, some school districts increased communications for families in languages other than English, and many plan to keep these new practices in place.

We wanted to share a follow-up conversation with Myisha Johnson, one of the three working members of State Street Tenant Resistance and the founder of Community First Plus, a new housing and environmental justice organization. She’s been connecting the dots between health problems and pollution from facilities like Kinder Morgan for over a decade. In this episode, we hear how Myisha felt when residents like her were asked to sign onto an administrative complaint to the EPA about the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Then, attorneys Sarah Rubenstein and Bob Menees of Great Rivers Environmental Law Center will share about what happened when they filed the administrative complaint to the EPA on behalf of the Missouri and St. Louis City NAACP and Dutchtown South Community Corporation.This is Part II of a two-part series on how tenants are organizing to hold problem landlords accountable, and what happens when large companies and the state need to be held accountable too. If you haven’t listened to Part I: Tenant Rights and Resistance, listen to it now!

How the Missouri education department measures student comprehension and school performance is complicated. The manual for determining a school’s…

Radi and Hadi Hamdan’s English is getting better, slowly. Sitting in the living room of their Florissant home on a recent evening, they struggled to get…

When nearly half the students in a school can’t speak English, every teacher becomes a language instructor to some extent.Recognizing that reality,…

A $2.7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will make it easier for three Missouri districts to meet new federal accountability metrics for…

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 3, 2009 - Bayless and Affton school districts were nearly caught off guard years ago when a…