Alexandra Holyk
Alexandra Holyk is a multi-skilled journalist at CTV News who focuses on how education and youth issues play out in the daily lives of students, families, and local communities. Her reporting combines school and campus storylines with broader neighbourhood events, keeping the impact on young people and those around them at the centre. She works across broadcast and digital platforms, building complete stories from initial idea to on-air segment and online coverage.
School decisions and family impact
Holyk’s education coverage often starts from the perspective of parents and students who are living through decisions made by schools and school boards. In her reporting on a Cambridge school’s choice to forego a formal graduation ceremony, she captures frustration from families who feel their children are missing an important milestone and examines how policy changes alter the student experience. She also reports on concerns about the treatment of Black students within the Upper Grand District School Board, focusing on how classroom and school environments affect students’ sense of safety and belonging. Across these pieces, she highlights specific decisions and incidents, then shows what they mean for the people directly affected rather than staying at the level of institutional statements.
Universities, research and student opportunity
Her education beat extends into post-secondary institutions, where she covers both research and student life.
In a recent segment on the University of Waterloo, Holyk reports on a major federal investment intended to attract top researchers, framing the story around how new funding shapes the university’s talent pool and long-term academic strength. She connects large-scale policy or funding announcements to concrete changes in campus opportunities and reputation, giving equal weight to institutional strategy and the practical implications for students and staff.
Student safety and youth behaviour
Holyk frequently reports on events where young people’s actions and environments raise questions of safety and responsibility. In coverage of Waterloo students who helped save a 12-year-old cyclist after a collision with a pickup truck, she focuses on personal support work students who stepped in during an emergency, emphasizing their training and quick response as part of the story. In another piece on kids allegedly throwing rocks at vehicles in Kitchener, she documents the damage and risk faced by drivers while examining the behaviour of youth involved and the community’s concern.
These reports treat safety incidents not just as isolated events but as windows into how children and teenagers navigate public spaces, training programs, and the consequences of their choices.
Community incidents around schools and neighbourhoods
Alongside strictly education-focused stories, Holyk covers neighbourhood incidents that shape the environment in which students and families live. Her reporting on a restaurant repeatedly targeted by vandalism looks at the toll on a local business owner and the persistence of property damage in the area. She uses these stories to show how crime, nuisance behaviour, and community tensions intersect with the everyday routines of residents, including young people and workers who move through these spaces. This blend of education, safety, and local incident coverage gives her work a cross-cutting view of how different systems and stressors meet in the streets, schools, and campuses of the region.
Multi-platform, community-centric reporting
Holyk’s approach is defined by hands-on, multi-platform reporting that keeps local voices central. In her current role, she pitches and develops stories that connect with local audiences while highlighting underrepresented voices, then researches, shoots, writes, edits, and presents the content herself for both television and digital platforms. Her previous work as a video journalist involved reporting on issues that matter to residents of an entire province, interviewing sources, shooting b-roll, writing scripts, editing reporter packs, and adapting each piece for the CTV website with digital copy and multimedia elements.
Beyond CTV News, her journalism has appeared in campus and regional outlets as well as major Canadian newspapers and business media, giving her experience with both student-focused publications and broader current affairs coverage. This mix of roles and platforms informs her current education beat, where she combines visual storytelling, concise writing, and detailed local reporting to show how institutional decisions and everyday events affect students and communities.
4 more education journalists.
Abby Russchen
Abby Russchen ties education, community institutions and individual stories together, showing how policies and decisions register in people’s lives. She reports for CBC on education and community life, working across text, video and photography for different CBC platforms. Her education coverage centres student achievement, provincial and national test results, classroom technology and the forces shaping learning conditions, connecting policy language and expert analysis to observable changes in performance. She treats AI, screens and digital tools as part of the education beat, focusing on their impact on student well-being. She also reports on community institutions and local services, from bank closures and changing city status to small-business growth. Her human-interest features follow people, public memory and recognition, and her long-form background supports detailed, fact-grounded narratives across formats.
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.
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.