Jay Shakur
Jay Shakur reports for WCPO 9 News with a focus on how public systems serve children, families and neighborhoods, especially when those systems fall short. He covers education alongside broader accountability stories, often centering the voices of parents, students and community leaders navigating schools, social services and local government.
Education accountability and school climate
Shakur’s education coverage looks closely at how policy and discipline play out in classrooms and hallways. In his reporting on parents demanding a child protective services investigation into alleged discipline disparities at Fairview-Clifton German Language School, he follows families who say punishment is being applied unevenly and asks what oversight exists when concerns escalate beyond the principal’s office. He tends to frame school stories around the lived experience of children and caregivers, rather than strictly around district talking points or abstract policy debates.
Across his education beat, he returns to questions of equity and safety: who is most affected by disciplinary practices, how transparent decision-making is, and how quickly institutions respond when treatment inside schools is challenged. His stories often track what happens after a complaint is raised, examining whether outside agencies get involved and how different authorities share or sidestep responsibility.
Youth mental health and community support
Shakur also reports on youth mental health and the organizations working to support young people. In coverage of a youth-powered group fighting Ohio’s mental health crisis, he highlights teens and young adults who organize around their own experiences, emphasizing how they try to close gaps left by formal systems of care. He focuses on what resources are available, how accessible they are, and how young people themselves define success when they push for change.
These stories often connect school environments, family dynamics and broader social pressures. Shakur shows how mental health challenges intersect with schooling and neighborhood life, and he pays attention to the practical support — funding, staffing, programming — that community organizations say they need to sustain their work.
Immigration enforcement and local policing
Beyond education, Shakur covers immigration enforcement cases that emerge from routine local policing. In a traffic-stop investigation where a Fairfield woman was taken into custody and turned over to immigration authorities, he documents how a local encounter on the road can quickly become a federal matter and what that means for families and communities. His reporting follows both the individual’s experience and the legal and policy questions raised when local agencies cooperate with immigration enforcement.
These stories fit into a broader pattern in his work: examining how different layers of government interact and where accountability lies when someone is detained or faces deportation after a seemingly minor stop. Shakur’s coverage in this area often foregrounds attorneys, advocates and affected residents as they describe the practical consequences of those interactions.
Neighborhood safety, crime and justice
Shakur frequently reports from specific neighborhoods on violent incidents and their aftermath. He has covered deadly shootings in Cincinnati and the frustration voiced by police union leaders after weekends of violence, showing how law enforcement and residents respond when multiple homicides occur in a short span. In other pieces, he has reported on financial aid deadlines for residents needing support and prosecuted fraud and arson cases, speaking with people who say they are directly affected by crime or by gaps in public response.
His crime and justice stories tend to connect individual cases to wider concerns about safety, trust in institutions and access to resources. Whether he is interviewing a business owner who says road construction has threatened a shop’s future or a community member reflecting on a hate incident, Shakur situates those accounts within the pressures facing local economies and historically marginalized communities. Across this work, he consistently returns to how decisions made by officials and agencies play out on the ground for ordinary people.
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.