Avery McGurgan
Avery McGurgan reports on education for the Centre Daily Times through community-focused feature stories that foreground local history, identity and celebration. As a summer intern, she concentrates on deeply reported pieces about State College residents and events rather than quick hits or breaking news. Her coverage sits at the intersection of education, civic life and inclusion, with an emphasis on how people experience social change in their own neighborhoods.
‘We’ve come a long way’: older LGBTQ+ State College residents reflect
One of McGurgan’s defining pieces looks at older LGBTQ+ residents in State College and the shifts they have witnessed in local acceptance and visibility. The story traces queer history in the town through first-person accounts, contrasting earlier periods of stigma with the present-day Pride celebrations summed up in the line “We’ve come a long way.” She uses these interviews to show how institutions, public spaces and community attitudes evolve over time, grounding broader conversations about LGBTQ+ rights in the lived experience of long-term residents. The focus stays on specific people and memories rather than abstract policy, giving the piece a reflective, historical tone that still connects directly to contemporary debates about inclusion and safety.
State College’s annual Juneteenth Block Party celebrates community
McGurgan also covers State College’s annual Juneteenth Block Party, treating it as both a celebration and a civic classroom about Black history and culture. Her reporting follows the event along Fraser Street and the Martin Luther King Jr. Plaza, detailing how organizers, performers and attendees describe the purpose of the gathering and its role in the community. She highlights the collaborative nature of the block party, noting the joint efforts that bring together local groups and institutions to mark the holiday. The piece blends scene-setting with quoted voices, using specific details—locations, performances, moments on the street—to show how commemoration and education happen in public, shared spaces. Through this work she extends her education beat beyond classrooms, showing how people learn about history and identity through local traditions and events.
Kickoff of the 56th Annual Special Olympics Pennsylvania
In addition to text features, McGurgan produces video-driven coverage such as her piece on the kickoff of the 56th Annual Special Olympics Pennsylvania. That work emphasizes atmosphere and participation, using short-form video to capture ceremony, competition and crowd energy while crediting her as both video creator and reporter. The focus on the Special Olympics reflects a broader thread in her portfolio: attention to inclusive events that center people who are often underrepresented in mainstream coverage. By pairing visuals with concise storytelling, she shows how local sports and community programs function as sites of belonging and recognition, especially for participants with disabilities. This multimedia approach complements her print features, giving her education and community reporting a wider range of formats and access points.
Across these assignments, McGurgan’s work is marked by a consistent interest in local features that document how communities remember, celebrate and push for inclusion. Whether she is interviewing LGBTQ+ elders, walking a Juneteenth block party, or filming the start of the Special Olympics, she keeps the focus on individual voices and specific places. For the Centre Daily Times, she brings an education lens that treats community events and histories as opportunities for public learning, rather than restricting the beat to institutional coverage alone.
4 more education journalists.
Abdul Latif Jameel
Abdul Latif Jameel publishes long-form, research-led pieces on how emerging technologies and scientific advances reshape education, industry, and society. He writes for the Abdul Latif Jameel masthead at the intersection of learning, innovation, and applied science, with a focus on technology, skills, and the future of learning. He explains complex fields such as quantum sensing in clear, accessible terms, breaking down frontier science and tying it to real-world applications. His coverage links breakthroughs in sensing, data, and automation to training, curriculum, and lifelong learning. He treats education as an applied system connected to industry, policy, infrastructure, and human development. He reports in an analytical, explanatory style, using research, pilots, and large-scale initiatives to examine how technologies are implemented, evaluated, and scaled in learning and training environments.
Adria Iraheta
Adria Iraheta is a community-focused reporter at Denver7, distinct for centering students, families and residents in every story about schools, neighborhoods and public services. She covers how decisions by school districts, local agencies and public institutions land in daily life, with a particular focus on Aurora and Arapahoe County. Her beat sits at the intersection of education, community issues, public services, safety, infrastructure, health and climate, from job cuts in a school district to a new transit safety app, DMV outages, street changes and record heat waves. With a decade of local television reporting experience, she reports on the ground in specific local scenes, using plain language, direct questions to officials and clear explanations to show how policies, programs and changes affect the people who live, study and work in Colorado communities.
Alan J. Borsuk
Alan J. Borsuk stands out for connecting what happens in schools to the policy and political decisions behind them. He writes in-depth K-12 education analysis for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and serves as a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. His work focuses on Milwaukee Public Schools, school choice, literacy, teacher pipelines, and school accountability. He uses long-range perspective, detailed reporting, and structured analysis to explain how reforms unfold, why they stall, and what they mean for students and leaders. He has also written on vouchers, Teach for America, discipline, and teacher evaluation, drawing on decades as a reporter and editor on education and public policy.
Alexandra Hardle
Alexandra Hardle brings a watchdog lens to K-12 schools, using concrete incidents to map how district power, oversight and accountability work in real life. She covers K-12 education for The Arizona Republic, focusing on school systems, governance and the lived impact of policy on students, families and educators. Her reporting shows how school governance can fail students and staff and what that reveals about district culture. She often covers flashpoints, such as the Nazi salute fallout in the Deer Valley district, as windows into deeper dysfunction, tracking how leadership responds, how trust breaks down and how conflicts unfold in public meetings. Her work sits at the intersection of accountability reporting and community stories, grounded in public records, formal rules and multiple stakeholder perspectives, with clear, direct language that explains how institutions make decisions and how ordinary people experience them.