Chuck Samples
Chuck Samples reports on how education decisions by school boards and higher education regents translate into funding, policy and accountability, with his coverage for KVOE rooted in the formal actions that shape classrooms and campuses.
School funding and board decisions
A recurring strand in his work is close tracking of school board deliberations around money and resources. In coverage of proposed funding changes affecting a local school district, he centers administrators and board members and sets out how the shift raises concerns inside the system. His stories stay with the governing bodies that control budgets, documenting how they respond in meetings and what those moves mean for district leadership.
He returns to board policy when personnel decisions intersect with conduct and standards. In reporting on a teacher whose contract was terminated for alleged violations of board policies, he follows the district’s public reaffirmation of staff conduct standards and connects disciplinary action back to the rules set by the board. Across these pieces he treats school governance as the through-line, keeping attention on how formal decisions affect staff and students rather than only on individual incidents.
Higher education tuition and fees
Samples extends that governance focus into higher education through coverage of tuition and fee plans approved by a Board of Regents. In his reporting on the approval of a plan covering tuition and fees at a regional university, he frames the story around the regents’ vote and the details of the proposal itself. His higher education work concentrates on how institutional leaders structure costs and how those choices are formalized, rather than on campus lifestyle or personality-driven features.
He treats tuition changes as policy decisions, explaining the outlines of what has been approved and situating those changes within the university’s broader planning. The emphasis is on clarity about the plan and the process that produced it, which distinguishes his coverage from more promotional or student-life oriented reporting on colleges.
Accountability and conduct in schools
Accountability inside schools is another consistent theme in his education reporting. In the case involving a former high school teacher who pleaded to sexual misconduct with teens, his coverage tracks both the legal developments and the district’s explicit statement on staff conduct expectations. He links the outcome of the case to the standards set by the district, showing how policy and enforcement intersect.
These stories are framed around institutional responsibility, not just allegation and drama. Samples highlights how boards and districts respond, what policies they cite, and how they articulate expectations for employees. That focus on formal standards gives his education reporting a regulatory and ethics dimension that goes beyond routine school-event coverage.
Community, politics and sports around the education beat
Although education is a core focus, his archive at KVOE shows wide-ranging coverage of community initiatives and local services. He reports on recovery and mental health events such as a celebration of the recovery process hosted by a local organization in a public park, giving space to program leaders and the people they serve. He covers arts initiatives like “Art Inspired by Hope,” where he notes the number of artists involved and reflects the enthusiasm of organizers bringing work into community spaces.
His stories also highlight support structures that sit alongside schools, including training sessions for volunteer managers and other civic roles. In these pieces he treats community capacity-building as newsworthy, outlining who is offering training, who it is for and when it is available. This community lens complements his education coverage by showing the broader network of services around students and families.
Samples’ work for KVOE includes weather and public safety reporting, such as forecasts that flag high wind watches, light snow and falling temperatures over a single weekend. He contributes to sports programming, including a “Sports Talk” segment where guests discuss high school basketball issues like the shot clock. He also sits down with political figures, including a gubernatorial candidate who notes an interview with him about campaign priorities and directing more money back to residents. Taken together, these strands show a reporter who moves between education, community services, sports and politics while keeping institutions and policy decisions at the center.
Across beats, Samples writes in a straightforward news style that reflects the outlet’s mix of broadcast and web coverage. He favors clear headlines that point directly to the decision or event at hand, whether it is a funding change, a board vote, a conduct case or a community program. For story placement, he tends toward hard news formats built around official actions and statements, with community features and talk segments used to add texture around the schools and public bodies he covers. That combination of governance-focused education reporting and broader community coverage marks him out from more generic beat reporters who stay narrowly inside classroom or campus life.
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.