Kendall Collins
Kendall Collins is a staff writer at Daily Hive who covers education as part of a wider beat on local institutions, housing, jobs, and everyday culture in and around Calgary. Her work is defined by a service angle: she uses university stories, rankings, and new programs to show how education fits into the broader civic and lifestyle picture. Across her archive, she blends coverage of universities and learning spaces with practical reporting on neighbourhoods, employment, and places to go, so education rarely appears in isolation.
University rankings, campus courses, and learning spaces
Education coverage for Collins centres on how major institutions evolve, gain recognition, and expand what they offer to students and the wider community. In one recent piece she reports on the University of Calgary’s position among the world’s top universities for 2027, framing the story around global rankings and the school’s climb on an international table.
Another article looks at the university launching a set of pop culture courses, focusing on how new subject matter broadens academic options and taps into current cultural trends. She also picks up education-adjacent projects such as a large recreation centre and library planned in west Calgary, connecting learning infrastructure to growth in community amenities.
Within this strand of her work, Collins treats universities and libraries as part of a network of civic institutions, tying recognition, new curricula, and facilities back to how people in the city study, gather, and spend their time.
Housing market, neighbourhoods, and real estate context
A second major thread in Collins’ reporting is the housing market and the character of different neighbourhoods in and around Calgary.
She tracks price movements closely, with pieces on detached home prices dropping in specific areas near the city and on the home types seeing the largest price declines compared to the previous year. Other stories rank or highlight neighbourhood dynamics, such as the fastest-selling areas, the most in-demand communities, and the most expensive districts at a given moment.
Alongside these market updates, she profiles individual properties, from multimillion-dollar homes that resemble castles or Parisian townhouses to high-end suites in historic buildings, using detailed descriptions to show how architecture, amenities, and price intersect. When read together, these housing and neighbourhood stories give her education coverage a clear backdrop, since universities and learning spaces sit within the same shifting landscape of affordability, demand, and urban development that she documents.
Jobs, civic projects, and local institutions
Collins regularly reports on employment opportunities and major civic projects, building a picture of the economic and institutional environment surrounding students and residents. She writes recurring roundups of companies hiring in Calgary and nearby municipalities, often noting that tens of thousands of jobs are available ahead of key dates or that some roles with the city pay well into six figures.
Her coverage of municipal hiring is complemented by pieces on broader economic developments, such as a financial technology company cutting more than one hundred positions and large infrastructure projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars that will not be completed for years. Civic institutions and amenities also appear frequently: she has reported on a new passenger rail system being planned in Alberta, a massive park slide under construction, and a 153-acre community and other residential projects bringing retail space and new housing stock.
In this strand of her beat, Collins shows how jobs, transportation, and community facilities - libraries, parks, recreation centres - shape the environment in which education happens and in which students and staff live and work.
Events, destinations, and everyday culture
A large share of Collins’ archive consists of service pieces on things to do, places to visit, and aspects of everyday life in Calgary and around Alberta.
She publishes weekly and weekend guides listing “awesome” or “spectacular” things to do in the city, often tied to specific dates or holidays such as Family Day, and extends this format to markets, parks, and winter walks. Destination stories spotlight scenic or “charming” small towns and hamlets, resort rankings, boating towns, and rugged Rockies communities pitched as ideal long weekend getaways.
She also covers festivals and entertainment, including a brand-new holiday light festival with more than a million lights, music events that are cancelled before launch, and a mini golf course at Sylvan Adventure Park in Alberta. Everyday culture appears through weather pieces about major temperature swings, local reactions to heavy snow, and articles on odd bylaws, famous landmarks, and historic firehalls and Stampede photos that invite readers to see the city’s past and quirks.
Human-interest stories - such as a stray cat reunited with its owner after eight years, an abandoned dog’s adoption journey, or a lottery winner’s delayed vacation - round out this coverage and reinforce her focus on how big and small events touch individual lives.
Across these strands, what distinguishes Collins is the way she situates education stories inside a broad, hyperlocal beat that spans housing, jobs, civic projects, and everyday destinations. A communications team with education news will find that her reporting favours clear, concrete developments - new rankings, new courses, new buildings, new hiring drives - and connects them to the lived experience of people navigating the city’s neighbourhoods, markets, festivals, and institutions.
4 more education journalists.
Abby Russchen
Abby Russchen ties education, community institutions and individual stories together, showing how policies and decisions register in people’s lives. She reports for CBC on education and community life, working across text, video and photography for different CBC platforms. Her education coverage centres student achievement, provincial and national test results, classroom technology and the forces shaping learning conditions, connecting policy language and expert analysis to observable changes in performance. She treats AI, screens and digital tools as part of the education beat, focusing on their impact on student well-being. She also reports on community institutions and local services, from bank closures and changing city status to small-business growth. Her human-interest features follow people, public memory and recognition, and her long-form background supports detailed, fact-grounded narratives across formats.
Alexa Phillips
Alexa Phillips reports on education as a financial system, tracing who pays, who benefits and who bears the risk when policy changes reshape schools and universities. She covers education policy, funding and regulation for The i Paper, with a consistent focus on money, power and their impact on students and staff. Her reporting follows fees, budgets and reform into classrooms and lecture halls, using concrete figures to show how tax changes, funding mechanisms and loan reforms translate into course cuts, job losses and access. Phillips brings wider experience on public services and regulation, including work on gambling oversight and healthcare access, so education sits in a larger accountability story. She writes straightforward, reported news pieces that combine policy detail, financial data and case studies, built from official records and regular call‑outs to readers affected by the systems she covers.
Alexandra Holyk
Alexandra Holyk is a multi-skilled journalist at CTV News who reports on education and youth issues through the daily lives of students, families, and local communities. She covers school and campus decisions, student safety, youth behaviour, and neighbourhood incidents, with a focus on how they affect the people directly involved. Her work includes stories on graduation choices, concerns about Black students in a school board, federal research funding at the University of Waterloo, and students who helped after a cyclist collision. She also covers vandalism and other local disruptions around schools and neighbourhoods. Holyk pitches, researches, shoots, writes, edits, and presents stories for broadcast and digital platforms. Her previous work includes video journalism for provincial coverage, along with reporting for campus and regional outlets and major Canadian newspapers and business media.
Annabelle Olivier
Annabelle Olivier ties system-level themes in Quebec’s school system to the immediate realities of parents and students, treating education as a lived experience rather than an abstract policy field. She is a digital journalist with CBC News, covering education and related public policy. Her work spans data breaches and digital privacy in schools, institutional conflicts and labour disputes that disrupt study plans, education on the campaign trail, and school infrastructure and land use. She reports on incidents like mass emails exposing sensitive parent data, suspended classes that leave students feeling like bargaining chips, and proposals to turn racetracks into schools. Her background in digital production at another major Canadian broadcaster shapes an online-first reporting style, grounded in specific incidents, clear descriptions, and detailed, verifiable facts drawn from documents, statements and interviews.