De'Jah Gross
De’Jah Gross tracks how school district money and governance decisions show up in the day-to-day lives of students, staff and families, with a primary focus on Cincinnati-area public schools. She covers education for WCPO 9 News, returning to the same systems over time as budgets tighten, positions are cut and communities organize in response. Her reporting combines clear explanation of complex financial decisions with concrete detail about who and what inside schools those choices affect.
Cincinnati Public Schools budgets and staffing
Gross’s core run of recent stories sits on the financial problems and staffing fallout inside Cincinnati Public Schools. She reports on the district’s decision to cut more than 100 positions to close a $58.6 million budget gap, spelling out that the board approved eliminating central office roles along with social workers, assistant principals and counselors. In that coverage she does not stop at the topline dollar figure, but lists specific categories of jobs on the line so readers can see which parts of the school workforce are shrinking. In earlier reporting, she walks through three budget pathways the Cincinnati Public Schools board weighed to cut millions in spending, noting board members’ view that each option would arrive at the same budget target even though the routes differed. Across these pieces, she follows the issue from the scenario-planning stage through to concrete votes and final staffing changes, treating budget shortfalls as an ongoing beat rather than a single news event.
School board decisions and community response
Gross also stays with Cincinnati Public Schools governance as it moves from the board table into public view. She covers meetings where confusion and frustration spill over among families and community members confronting “devastating budget cuts,” including coverage citing an $8.7 million reduction figure for the district. Her work includes scenes of families gathering to protest possible massive cuts to public school funding, documenting not just the decisions but the turnout, signs and voices of those who feel the impact most directly. In election and ballot-related coverage, she appears as the education reporter on a “Money Matters” segment walking through what is at stake for six school districts, explaining for viewers how local votes translate into dollars for schools. The through-line in this stream of work is that she connects procedural decisions to the people who show up at meetings, rallies and on election night when those decisions become real.
District elections, accountability and school programs
Beyond pure budget math, Gross uses stories to show how financial and policy choices reshape classroom and program experience. Her reporting has been cited in coverage of efforts such as community fundraising tied to core subjects like math, highlighting how gaps in traditional funding can filter down to specific academic needs. She covers accountability moments when district leaders must explain cuts, tradeoffs or new proposals, pressing on what the changes mean for services that families consider essential. At the same time, she takes on feature segments inside individual schools, including a special piece on the retirement of Dave Allen, a long-serving figure who created and led a program at Elder High School, marking how long-term educators shape a school community. This mix of accountability reporting and school-level storytelling keeps her education beat anchored both in policy decisions and in the culture of local schools.
Broadcast-driven, multimedia reporting
Gross brings a broadcast-first, multimedia approach to the education beat, shaped by experience as a reporter, anchor and producer at WETM-TV in Elmira, New York before joining WCPO 9. At WCPO 9, she works across formats, with her education coverage appearing as on-air segments, online articles and short social video, including reels that introduce her work or revisit earlier sports and school reporting. Public-facing materials identify her as the station’s education reporter, and she is introduced that way in coverage that walks audiences through school finance and election stakes. She also participates as a speaker on an “MMJ Toolkit” panel focused on multimedia journalism craft, reflecting a professional emphasis on gathering, producing and presenting stories herself across platforms. That background shows up in her education reporting style, which leans on clear explanatory scripting and tightly focused segments that break complex school-system issues into understandable pieces for a general audience.
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.