CHICAGO (WLS) — Suspected tornadoes have left extensive damage in Kankakee County in Illinois and into neighboring Indiana Tuesday.

The storms also produced hail ranging in size from two to four inches, the National Weather Service said. The NWS said the largest hailstone produced was six inches in diameter, which fell in Kankakee. The NWS said the hailstone may be a state record for Illinois.

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The NWS said a supercell that went from Pontiac, Illinois to Pontiac, Indiana spawned at least four tornadoes in Pontiac and south of Kankakee in Illinois and Lake Village an Wheatfield in Indiana.

The NWS is sending survey teams to the area Wednesday to investigate the damage.

Search crews worked late into the night looking for people who may have been left trapped by the storm damage as severe weather hit the Kankakee area.

The area in Aroma Park along Sandbar Road was one of the places hardest hit.

Dangerous weather ripped through the area leaving a path of destruction.

The powerful storms driving rain and gusting winds downed at least a half dozen power lines that were snapped in half by gusting winds.

One homeowner says the storm blew out windows and leveled a two-story barn.

A concrete silo was also destroyed.

The fire lieutenant says a man did have to be rescued from the basement of a home with heavy damage. But otherwise, I have not heard of any serious injuries from the storm.

The American Red Cross has set up a shelter at Kankakee Community College for those impacted by the storms.

There has also been major damage across the state line in Indiana. Most of the damage is in the town of Lake Village.

Video shows a number of homes and buildings destroyed.

The local fire department says a tornado had a wide path of destruction and continued for several miles.

So far, officials said there have been only a few minor injuries.

They said the tornado sirens went off with plenty of time to alert people in the area.

People impacted by the storm can go to North Newton High School for support.

People living in Kankakee described the hail as almost as large as their hands, pounding the pavement and causing extensive damage.

“As if I have a bulletproof car and somebody was, like, shooting a machine gun or something like that. That’s how hard it was hitting,” Jon Robicheaux said.

Some car windows were left shattered.

“It just kept tearing into my front windshield,” Robicheaux said. “The back went out first, and it kept hitting the front. And it constantly got damaged.”

He had to pull over to find shelter.

“And I was kind of scared a tornado would’ve came over me while I was parked because I couldn’t see anything,” Robicheaux said.

Some cars in the west suburbs were damaged, as well, after golf ball- to baseball-sized hail fell.

One large chunk of hail came down on Gabrielle Zinkel’s car as she was driving home to Homer Glen from work in Downers Grove, shattering her back windshield.

“It sounded exactly like bullets hitting your car. Like, I was like, did my windshield just get shot through? Like what just happened? Because I did not think. I was like, OK, I’m going to come through this with some dents. But I didn’t think that this thing would hit my windshield and crack it right open,” Zinkel said.

There was also heavy rain and hail in parts of the city.

The hail sent people scrambling around dusk.

ComEd said as of 5 a.m., about 27,000 customers were impacted by the storm, with power restored to all but about 4,000 customers. Those without power were mainly in Kankakee County.

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• The Exchange Visiting Teachers from Spain helps schools find qualified Spanish teachers.
• World language teaching positions are hard to fill in rural areas.

The sounds of Dallas Center-Grimes High School Spanish students singing “¿Por Que Te Vas?” by Jeanette with varying levels of gusto and prodding by teacher Antton Zuazu Hernández may seem like an unusual way to learn.

But the sing-along is how Zuazu Hernández, a native of Spain, helps engage his students and share his culture as part of a teacher-exchange program.

“I feel I’m a messenger in a way, and this is part of the program,” he said. “We’re expected to both bring our culture here and bring your culture back to Spain.”

Zuazu Hernández — who taught English in Spain — is among 26 bilingual teachers in Iowa as part of an exchange program between the Iowa Department of Education and Spain’s Ministry of Education and Culture.

“(The program) was created to address the shortage of qualified Spanish teachers in the state and helps expose students to different world cultures,” said Heather Doe, the department’s spokesperson. “… The Exchange Visiting Teachers from Spain program has been very successful in helping schools, especially in rural communities, hire highly qualified Spanish teachers.”

Iowa has nearly 1,200 world language teachers in kindergarten through college, according to the Iowa World Language Association website.

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Some foreign language teachers in Iowa moved to the U.S. and later obtained teaching credentials. Others were recruited to work in Iowa schools.

Iowa schools, including Waukee Community School District, even offer financial incentives as a recruitment tool for hard to fill positions.

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“Many of them, like me, will arrive with teaching experience from our home countries, but in the process of validating the credentials in the U.S. we find obstacles,” said Elizabeth Bulthuis, a Waukee High School world languages teacher who immigrated from Ecuador in 2003, “and the validating of credentials also can be lengthy and costly, because of all the educational systems and how they are structured differently.”

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The Spain exchange program — which brings hundreds of teachers to schools across the U.S. — comes with several requirements.

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The Spanish teachers must be certified in the language with at least two years of experience, Doe said. Additionally, candidates go through a vetting process at the federal, state and local levels. Teachers also attend a three-day state orientation.

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Schools and districts participating in the program pay an $895 fee to offset licensing and orientation costs, Doe said.

The program is a blessing for rural areas struggling to fill positions teaching foreign language, special education, math and science.

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“It’s very difficult to even get an applicant,” said Deron Stender, the superintendent at the rural Creston Community School District, “… When I say it’s difficult to even find (the candidates) they don’t exist. And if they do, they’re probably going to be in a larger metro, urban, suburban areas where there’s just more opportunities.”

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St. Anthony’s conducts bilingual class for its students

St. Anthony’s Catholic school brings Spanish speaking teachers to the U.S. to teach students the language.

Zuazu Hernández taught Spanish and drove a bus at Creston during the 2024-25 school year. But falling enrollment and budget cuts resulted in his position being eliminated.

A program drawback is teachers only have three-year visas, he said.

“When you have a very good individual that comes to your district from a foreign country after the third year, you still have that need again,” Stender said. “So, we just open it back up to the same program, but you’re doing another refresh of the process, and while that’s a challenge, it’s still better than not having a teacher in the classroom.”

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Not every world language teacher comes from Spain

Another issue schools have faced is filling teaching positions for immersion programs.

In the early 2000s, St. Anthony’s started a Spanish-immersion program after several families with children of Honduras and Guatemala descent wanted their kids to have a Catholic school education and maintain their connection to the Spanish language.

“A lot of teachers go to school to teach Spanish, but they go to school to teach it as a standalone Spanish class,” principal Jennifer Raes said. “… We were really searching for teachers that could come here and teach in any subject, just a regular teacher, but also has the skills of teaching in Spanish and English.”

Marisol Guerra, a Honduras native, came to the U.S. in 2010 to help start St. Anthony’s program. Guerra manage to come to the U.S. as part of that year’s Spain exchange program cohort.

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More than a decade later, the school offers classes in English and an immersive track where 85% of the students’ day is spent learning in Spanish. While families were hesitant in the beginning to take part in the immersion program, there is now a waitlist of almost a dozen families.

“There was uncertainty, (but) they wanted their children to learn a second language,” Guerra said, “and they wanted without knowing, I think, they also were exposing them to other cultures and opening their minds to other things.”

The over the years, St. Anthony’s has employed teachers who moved to America from Spain, Mexico and other Latin American countries.

The over representation of teachers from Spain likely is due to other countries not offering similar exchange programs, said Bulthuis, a member of the Iowa World Language Association.

It took several years for the veteran teacher — who came to Iowa in 2005 — to become credentialed to teach in the U.S. because she was not part of an exchange program.

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“I think that world language teachers can be difficult to recruit because the pool of candidates is relatively small, so teachers need a strong language proficiency, cultural knowledge and all the teaching certifications,” said Bulthuis, who left Ecuador in 2003 because of the country’s financial crisis, “(but) many people who speak another language also have opportunity in other careers.”

Bulthuis does not recommend loosening the criteria to teach in Iowa but suggests improving or streamlining the process for an international teacher to obtain a state teaching license.

“… Not every Spanish speaking country is going to have (an exchange) program like that in place to help their community,” Bulthuis said,

Cultural exchange

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Educators say employing international teachers goes beyond language skills.

“International educators can bring tremendous cultural and linguistic expertise to the classroom, which is an incredible skill and very valuable for students,” Bulthuis said.

That cultural exchange can carry over into a school’s lesson plans.

Zuazu Hernández often lets his American students’ interests drive what he teaches them about Spanish culture. These questions have ranged from wanting more insight into bullfighting, the Spanish school system, stereotypes and politics.

“Sometimes, they are more interested in me as a person, or the things I can tell them about Spain than the actual Spanish language,” he said, “but they have that curiosity that I think all teachers, we have to take advantage of.”

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While reading “¡Viva el toro!” by Lisa Ray Turner and Blaine Ray, a novel about bullfighting, Zuazu Hernández talked to students about his family’s love of the cultural spectacle and how it is losing popularity in Spain because of how the bulls are treated.

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Zuazu Hernández is open about his perspective on the practice to his students.

“To me, bullfighting is not worth sustaining just because it’s a tradition — traditions are not always good or acceptable — but rather because it’s an art, and it expands the depth of human understanding of the most intense truths in life, with death as the scariest of all,” he told the Des Moines Register in an email.

His students appreciate his candidness and the chance to learn from teachers with different lived experiences.

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“I like having different teachers because they have different experiences, and I think it adds to the overall class,” said Grace Heston, an 11th grader Dallas Center-Grimes High School. “When you’re learning about Spanish, you’re not just learning about a language, you’re learning about the culture associated with it.”

Samantha Hernandez covers education for the Register. Reach her at (515) 851-0982 or svhernandez@gannett.com. 

Some 1,700 Kansans had their driver’s licenses invalidated last month. It wasn’t for racking up speeding tickets or a DUI charge, but because they are transgender.

Kansas is one of five states to prohibit trans people from changing the gender marker on their licenses, but it is the first to pass a law that retroactively cancels licenses that were already changed. The law also invalidated birth certificates for those who updated their gender markers.

Hundreds of trans drivers already received letters from the state informing them their documents were “invalid immediately” and they “may be subject to additional penalties” if they continue to drive, unless they surrender the license to the Kansas Division of Vehicles and receive a new one with their birth sex.

“I’m pretty heartbroken,” said Jaelynn Abegg, a 41-year-old trans woman living in Wichita who received a letter. She said she will not turn in her license and plans to move this month to another state.

“It is a continuation of the message that the Legislature has been sending out for years now, and that is that transgender people are not welcome in Kansas,” she said.

Two anonymous trans residents sued Kansas last month, arguing that the law violates state protections for personal autonomy, privacy, equality, due process and freedom of speech. On Tuesday, Douglas County District Judge James McCabria declined to grant a temporary restraining order against the law while the case proceeds.

McCabria wrote in his decision that there isn’t enough evidence to show that trans people will face harassment and discrimination if they have to use bathrooms or show IDs that conflict with their gender identities.

Kansas law was years in the making

Kansas had allowed trans people to update the gender markers on their IDs since 2007. Then in 2023, it changed its legal definition of sex to be male or female and assigned at birth.

Fifteen other states have made a similar change in the past few years — and President Donald Trump issued an executive order declaring that there are only two unchangeable sexes. The State Department now prohibits trans people from changing the gender markers on their passports.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach sued the state, arguing that allowing people to update their gender markers violated the 2023 law. Last year, the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed an appeals court decision and allowed gender marker changes to resume.

In January, Kobach backed the new bill he said would “correct an error” by the courts. The state Senate added a provision prohibiting trans people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identities in government-owned buildings. It was passed without public comment. The penalties for violating the provision can be $1,000 for individuals and up to $125,000 for government entities with more than one infraction.

Last month, Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the bill, saying the Legislature “should stay out of the business of telling Kansans how to go to the bathroom and instead stay focused on how to make life more affordable for Kansans.” Days later, the Republican-held state Legislature overrode her veto.

Kansas House Speaker Daniel Hawkins, a Republican, said in a statement at the time that the law’s purpose was to protect women. “This isn’t about scoring political points, but doing what’s right for women and girls across our communities,” he said, according to the Kansas Reflector. Hawkins did not respond to NBC News’ request for comment.

State Rep. Mark Schreiber, the only Republican to vote against the bill, told NBC News he agreed with the appeals court that Kobach could not show how allowing trans people to change the gender markers on their licenses caused harm to the state.

“I don’t have any trans folks in my family, but I know trans people,” he said, adding that they aren’t looking for special privileges and just want to live their lives. “And we seem to keep passing laws that keep getting in the way of that.”

Harper Seldin, one of the ACLU attorneys involved in the lawsuit, said during court arguments Friday that the Kansas Legislature singled out trans Kansans “for unique social stigma.”

“They were suddenly required, with no notice or opportunity to be heard, to present themselves to the DMV to obtain driver’s licenses that announced to everyone — the teller at the bank, the clerk at the hotel, the poll worker on election day — that they are transgender,” Seldin said.

Trans people have long reported facing more harassment and discrimination while using IDs that don’t align with their gender identity or expression, and many trans Kansans said they fear that their daily risk of facing such harassment would only increase as a result of the law.

‘There was no plan whatsoever’

Over the last five years, dozens of states have considered bills targeting transgender people, but the majority of those have targeted people’s ability to play on school sports teams that align with their gender identities and minors’ access to transition-related care. In the last few years, state and federal policies have shifted to focus on changing legal definitions of sex and restricting access to updated identity documents.

Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank that tracks legislation, described these broader laws as “gender regulation laws” that attack the fundamental rights and identity of trans people.

“The point all along for the people pushing these bills and these attacks has been to single out transgender people and create a license to discriminate against transgender people and remove them from public life,” he said. “In effect, trying to get them to stop being transgender.”

Kansas’ law took effect immediately after it was published in the register Feb. 26. A spokesperson for the Kansas Department of Revenue told the Kansas Reflector that the law invalidated about 1,700 licenses. The department did not respond to a request for comment. During the court hearing Friday, Kobach said the department had so far sent letters to 275 Kansans and 138 had received new licenses.

Andrea Ellis, a 34-year-old trans woman living in Wellington, said she received a letter Wednesday even though she never changed the gender marker on her license — she only legally changed her name on it in December. She drove to the DMV the next day, where she said staff were confused about what to do and said her license had a “flag” on it.

They cut the corner off her license and gave her a temporary one. But later that day, they called her and said she had to return to the DMV because they made an error. When she went back, she said they gave her another temporary license that looked the same as the first.

“They claim that it was thought out, and everything else, but there was no grace period unlike any other kind of rollout program,” Ellis said. “There was no plan whatsoever.”

Some trans residents, like Matthew Neumann, said they still haven’t received any notification regarding their licenses. Neumann, who is the executive director of the LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas, said he’s been checking the validity of his license every day on the Kansas Department of Revenue website, and it’s still valid as of Friday.

Neumann said his organization has raised funds to help trans Kansans pay to update their licenses. Getting a license with an updated gender marker costs $8.75, while receiving a new ID is $26.

Neumann has lived in Larned, Kansas, for 20 years and said he will never leave. He said he’s been threatened over his restroom use, and he fears he could face more harassment under the new law.

“I’m just disappointed and frustrated,” he said. “I’m just hoping that maybe this is the wake up call we need,” he said.