Katie Ellington Serrao
Katie Ellington Serrao covers how local education systems and related community issues affect everyday life, with a particular focus on school governance, staffing, and family supports. She is a lead reporter and solutions journalism coordinator at Richland Source, where her beat centers on education and extends into housing and other community topics. Since 2019, she has worked as a staff reporter for the newsroom, consistently returning to stories about schools, housing and feature reporting.
School boards and district decisions
Ellington Serrao’s education coverage often follows school boards as they make consequential decisions about personnel and finances. Her reporting on Madison Local Schools includes the termination of teacher Abby Radabaugh, documenting how board actions affect staff and classroom environments. She also reports on the Lexington school board’s approval of 24 staff cuts tied to a levy push, capturing the connection between budget pressures, ballot measures and staffing levels. Across these stories, she concentrates on the mechanics and outcomes of board decisions, focusing on employment, program continuity and the practical impact on students and families. This work positions her as a consistent observer of district governance, contract issues and the trade-offs school leaders make under financial strain.
Education, child care and family impact
Beyond boardrooms, Ellington Serrao reports on child care and how the cost of care and supplies shapes family life and access to early education. She has worked on a series about child care, actively seeking perspectives from parents and caregivers to inform her coverage. That approach reflects her broader beat, where education is treated as part of a larger support system that includes early learning, family finances and access to services. Her stories in this area examine pressure points for families and providers, showing how policy decisions and local market conditions play out in daily routines.
Housing and community issues
Housing is a regular strand in Ellington Serrao’s work, sitting alongside her education reporting and feature writing. Her author bios describe a focus on education, housing and features, highlighting a beat that moves between schools and the places where their communities live. Within this scope, she covers housing and broader community issues as part of the same local story, giving attention to how residents experience change in their neighborhoods. That mix of education and housing reporting allows her to follow topics such as stability, opportunity and community infrastructure across different types of coverage.
Solutions-focused local reporting
Ellington Serrao’s role includes coordinating solutions journalism, and her beat is explicitly framed through solutions and engagement angles. Descriptions of her work note coverage of education, economic development and agricultural issues with a focus on responses to local problems rather than only their causes. In practice, this means she reports on initiatives, programs and collaborations that aim to address challenges in schools and the wider community. She also contributes to sister publications under the same ownership, carrying this solutions-oriented approach into education and community stories across multiple local newsrooms. Taken together, her role at Richland Source is defined by deep engagement with local institutions and residents, and by a consistent emphasis on what is being tried to improve conditions in education and related community spheres.
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.