Abby Russchen
Abby Russchen reports for CBC on education and community life, drawing a line between policies, institutions and the people who live with their consequences. Her stories move between student performance, public services and local businesses, showing how decisions made far away land in classrooms, main streets and public spaces. She works across text, video and photography, packaging stories for different CBC platforms.
Education outcomes and classroom technology
Russchen’s education coverage focuses on student achievement and the forces shaping learning conditions. She reports on provincial student test results and interviews the education minister on how “non-academic elements of student success” are being used to bring students back up to speed after dismal scores. She covers national concerns about slipping Canadian student test scores and highlights experts who link these trends to heavy screen use and the rapid spread of artificial intelligence tools in and around classrooms.
In this work she connects policy language and expert analysis to observable changes in student performance, giving education stories a clear grounding in data and outcomes.
Her reporting treats technology as part of the education beat rather than a separate subject. By exploring AI, screens and digital tools through the lens of test results and student well-being, she shows how innovations and devices affect learning, not just how they are deployed. This makes her coverage useful for stories that need both the policy frame and the day-to-day classroom perspective.
Community institutions and local services
Russchen consistently reports on the fate of core institutions in the communities she covers, especially services that underpin economic and civic life. She has written about a town losing its only bank, documenting residents who describe themselves as “devastated” and laying out the practical fallout for people and businesses that depend on in-person banking. She has covered the changing status of Saint John, once the largest city in its province and now facing new demographic realities, using the city’s shifting rank as a way to talk about broader economic and population change.
In these stories, institutions like banks and cities are treated as lived infrastructures, not abstractions, and the reporting stays close to the practical impacts on access, opportunity and identity.
She applies the same lens to smaller-scale economic life.
Her coverage of a Korean-inspired bakery opening a second downtown location follows the business decision, the people behind it and what a new storefront means for the surrounding neighbourhood. By pairing stories about service loss, such as bank closures, with stories about new openings and expansions, she builds a picture of communities that are changing in uneven ways. This focus on services and institutions makes her a fit for stories about access, economic inclusion and how policy or corporate decisions translate into everyday realities.
Human-interest features and public memory
Russchen’s feature work centres individual stories that sit inside wider public contexts. She has reported on Canada’s youngest female hot air balloon pilot launching her balloon at a hometown festival, foregrounding the pilot’s work with children with disabilities and her studies in biology alongside the visual spectacle of the event.
The piece ties together personal ambition, care work and education, showing how a singular profile can open into questions about inclusion and opportunity. In another story, she covers the unveiling of a memorial honouring police officers killed in a 2018 shooting, describing how a repurposed bridge pier is now illuminated nightly to keep their names visible in one of the city’s most public spaces.
That coverage treats design choices, location and ritual as parts of a continuing conversation about public memory and loss.
She also writes about national honours through a community lens, as in her reporting on a Caraquet man appointed to the Order of Canada, which focuses on the individual’s contributions and the significance of the recognition for his community. Across these features, the emphasis is on people and the environments they inhabit, whether that is a festival field, a riverside monument or the network of relationships around a newly honoured resident.
This approach gives her human-interest work a clear connection to broader themes of public service, recognition and communal identity.
Multi-platform reporting craft
Russchen works across formats, combining reporting, writing, videography and photography in her journalism.
Her CBC work includes web articles with detailed explainers and on-the-ground descriptions, alongside stories that are packaged for broadcast and digital video. This multi-platform practice shapes how she structures stories: visuals, quotes and explanatory context are all built to hold up on screen and on the page.
Her background in long-form feature writing, including recognized student feature work, has sharpened her ability to carry narrative detail and character development through to the end of a piece while keeping the reporting grounded in verifiable facts.
Across beats, Russchen’s distinguishing trait is the way she ties education, community institutions and individual stories together. Whether she is covering test scores, bank closures, city rankings, small-business growth or public memorials, her reporting keeps returning to how systems and decisions register in people’s lives. That through-line gives her work coherence and makes her a useful contact for stories that span education, local services and human-interest angles within the same narrative.
4 more education journalists.
Alexa Phillips
Alexa Phillips reports on education as a financial system, tracing who pays, who benefits and who bears the risk when policy changes reshape schools and universities. She covers education policy, funding and regulation for The i Paper, with a consistent focus on money, power and their impact on students and staff. Her reporting follows fees, budgets and reform into classrooms and lecture halls, using concrete figures to show how tax changes, funding mechanisms and loan reforms translate into course cuts, job losses and access. Phillips brings wider experience on public services and regulation, including work on gambling oversight and healthcare access, so education sits in a larger accountability story. She writes straightforward, reported news pieces that combine policy detail, financial data and case studies, built from official records and regular call‑outs to readers affected by the systems she covers.
Alexandra Holyk
Alexandra Holyk is a multi-skilled journalist at CTV News who reports on education and youth issues through the daily lives of students, families, and local communities. She covers school and campus decisions, student safety, youth behaviour, and neighbourhood incidents, with a focus on how they affect the people directly involved. Her work includes stories on graduation choices, concerns about Black students in a school board, federal research funding at the University of Waterloo, and students who helped after a cyclist collision. She also covers vandalism and other local disruptions around schools and neighbourhoods. Holyk pitches, researches, shoots, writes, edits, and presents stories for broadcast and digital platforms. Her previous work includes video journalism for provincial coverage, along with reporting for campus and regional outlets and major Canadian newspapers and business media.
Annabelle Olivier
Annabelle Olivier ties system-level themes in Quebec’s school system to the immediate realities of parents and students, treating education as a lived experience rather than an abstract policy field. She is a digital journalist with CBC News, covering education and related public policy. Her work spans data breaches and digital privacy in schools, institutional conflicts and labour disputes that disrupt study plans, education on the campaign trail, and school infrastructure and land use. She reports on incidents like mass emails exposing sensitive parent data, suspended classes that leave students feeling like bargaining chips, and proposals to turn racetracks into schools. Her background in digital production at another major Canadian broadcaster shapes an online-first reporting style, grounded in specific incidents, clear descriptions, and detailed, verifiable facts drawn from documents, statements and interviews.
Cameron Kilfoy
Cameron Kilfoy reports on how institutional decisions play out in everyday life, with a steady focus on policy, accountability and the people affected. He covers education within a wider public-policy beat, especially Memorial University decisions and student experience, showing how rules and oversight protect or fail students and other residents. At CBC he blends breaking news, explanatory pieces and community features, grounding complex choices in clear examples of impact. His reporting tracks child welfare and oversight in foster care, environmental risk and wildfire recovery, emergencies such as a commercial flight’s emergency landing, and energy projects, regulation and housing. He also writes culture and sport features that tie events and teams to community identity. He uses direct language, concrete detail and a mix of official voices, experts and first-hand accounts to show how decisions made in institutions reach classrooms, homes and neighbourhoods.