Becky Phelps
Becky Phelps is a reporter and anchor at KCRG-TV9 who focuses on how education and community decisions play out in the lives of students and families. She pairs daily reporting on schools and youth issues with explainer formats and interactive projects that invite students and viewers to take part in the conversation. Her work often sits at the intersection of policy, classroom realities, and the broader social forces shaping how young people grow up.
Ask 9: explaining local decisions and big questions
Phelps co-hosts Ask 9, a streaming show at the station created to take viewer questions and unpack complex topics in a conversational way. The show is built around breaking down big stories into clear, direct explanations, with Phelps sharing the desk with other station anchors and specialists. In one episode, she walks through the Iowa City Community School District’s financial crisis, outlining what the board has decided and what it could mean for students and staff. In another, she teams up with meteorologist Joe Winters to explain NASA’s Artemis II mission, giving viewers a straightforward rundown of what the mission is, why it matters, and how experts are thinking about it. Across these segments she acts as a translator between official decisions or technical subjects and the questions viewers bring to the show.
Education coverage, from school finance to student sports
Education is a core focus of Phelps’s reporting, with coverage that ranges from district budgets to the opportunities available to individual students. Her work on the Iowa City Community School District crisis sits alongside stories that track statewide rules for students, such as changes allowing Iowa eighth graders to compete in high school sports, connecting eligibility decisions to student experience and school athletics. She stays close to how institutional choices reach into the classroom and onto the playing field, often grounding policy stories in concrete examples from students’ lives. When the station’s investigative team digs into the social media use of kids, she picks up that thread on air by examining her own and her co-anchor’s phone habits, using that exercise to highlight how pervasive screen time has become for families. Her education coverage tends to bring together school board decisions, expert voices, and the day-to-day reality for students, rather than treating any one piece in isolation.
Beyond hard news, Phelps helps run the station’s Summer Writing Contest, which is aimed at school-age writers and framed around civic-minded prompts. The 2026 contest asks students to respond to the question of what project they would pursue to improve their neighborhood, school, or community, tying creative work directly to the places where they live and learn. By fronting this contest from the newsroom, she extends her education beat into a direct invitation for young people to describe how they would change their own surroundings, turning students from subjects of stories into contributors to the station’s coverage.
Community series and life-around-school stories
Phelps also spends time on longer-form and series pieces that touch the broader world around school, including community identity and relationships. She has filmed in “Our Town Waukon,” a recurring franchise that devotes a week of coverage to highlighting “exciting things” happening in that community, with segments scheduled to roll out across several days of programming. In another line of reporting, she fronts a multi-part story on modern dating that asks why experts say dating today is harder than ever, teasing a second installment that continues the exploration. These series sit alongside her education work but share the same interest in how social trends and community changes shape everyday life for viewers.
Within the newsroom, Phelps’s role extends across platforms. She has anchored the station’s weekend evening news, bringing that on-air experience into her later work on Ask 9 and special projects. In a behind-the-scenes update, she introduces herself as an anchor and reporter while walking viewers through upgrades to the station’s podcast studio, underscoring her involvement in developing the outlet’s audio and digital presence alongside its television coverage. Across live newscasts, streaming explainers, podcasts and contests, she keeps the focus on clear language and practical implications, anchoring her work in what students, parents and community members need to know next.
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.