Mark A. Kellner
Mark A. Kellner reports on how Christian institutions handle education, governance, and the law for The Roys Report, with a particular focus on disputes and misconduct in colleges, churches, and ministries. He writes hard-news pieces that track lawsuits, criminal cases, and legislation, drawing on a long career on the religion beat across national, denominational, and specialist outlets.
Christian higher education and Truett McConnell University
Kellner’s education coverage centers on Christian higher education, where he follows how governing boards, presidents, and donors respond when crises surface. In his reporting on former Truett McConnell University president Emir Caner’s lawsuit against the Baptist-affiliated school, he walks through the details of Caner’s 2021 contract and the requirement that any early termination be “for cause.” He explains the suit’s claim that the board breached that agreement by firing Caner without establishing a for-cause basis, and notes the years remaining on the contract when the dismissal occurred. The piece is structured around the court filing and official statements, with attention to contract language, timelines, and what the complaint asks the court to do, rather than commentary. That combination of institutional context, document-heavy reporting, and close reading of the fine print is typical of how he treats education stories linked to Christian colleges and universities.
Sexual abuse cases in churches and schools
A second through-line in Kellner’s work is the handling of sexual abuse allegations inside church-linked settings, including schools attached to congregations. In one report, he covers a San Antonio pastor and church schoolteacher charged with the sexual abuse of multiple female family members, foregrounding both the criminal allegations and the individual’s roles within the church and school. His framing keeps the alleged victims and the specific charges in view while also flagging the institutional responsibilities of the congregation and its educational arm. The emphasis is on who knew what when, what law enforcement and prosecutors have done, and how church leadership responds once charges are public. Across similar stories, he tends to treat criminal complaints, police reports, and charging documents as the backbone of the narrative, with institutional responses and survivor concerns organized around that core.
Megachurch and ministry lawsuits
Kellner also covers litigation involving large churches and ministries, especially when plaintiffs allege systemic failures or financial and governance abuses. His author page at The Roys Report highlights coverage of a federal judge dismissing a class-action lawsuit against Texas megachurch Gateway Church and its former senior pastor Robert Morris, a case that sits at the intersection of church governance, accountability to congregants, and the limits of civil litigation. In that kind of story, he explains what the plaintiffs claimed, what legal theories they relied on, and why the court declined to let the case proceed, translating legal rulings into plain language while keeping key names and institutional structures clear. This legal focus extends beyond individual megachurches; he follows ministry-facing legislation as well, such as a piece on the U.S. Senate sending a federal version of “Trey’s Law” to the House after a similar effort stalled in Oklahoma, situating that bill within broader debates over abuse reporting and institutional accountability. The consistent thread is an interest in how ministries and their leaders answer in civil courts and legislatures for what happens under their watch.
Religion, politics, and a long reporting career
Kellner’s current education and abuse coverage rests on decades of religion reporting experience. He has been writing about religious news since 1983, contributing to religion-focused analysis sites and other outlets that specialize in how faith intersects with public life. His background includes editorial and reporting roles with a denominational magazine, where he served as an online content editor and previously as news editor, giving him long exposure to internal church governance, denominational politics, and global faith trends. He has also worked as a Faith & Family reporter at The Washington Times, covering how religious belief plays out in family life, culture, and policy debates for a general news audience. On professional bios he describes himself as a national reporter on a faith and politics beat, and notes past work as a Nevada campaign reporter for the New York Post in addition to his faith and family reporting experience. That mix of political, denominational, and cultural assignments informs his current work for The Roys Report, where he treats education stories as part of a wider ecosystem of church power, public policy, and legal accountability rather than as campus news in isolation.
Across these strands, Kellner’s coverage is defined less by personality-driven narrative than by documents, chronology, and institutional context. He consistently builds stories around contracts, complaints, court orders, criminal charges, and bills moving through legislatures, then layers in responses from schools, churches, ministries, and affected individuals. The result is coverage that is tightly focused on facts and procedures, with recurring attention to Christian higher education, church-linked abuse cases, megachurch and ministry lawsuits, and the points where religion, politics, and the law intersect.
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.