Megan Tomasic
Megan Tomasic reports on K-12 education for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, focusing on how policies, benefits and board decisions shape day-to-day life in public schools. Since 2022, she has covered K-12 schools for the masthead, with stories that connect administrative decisions to the experiences of teachers, students and families. Her coverage stands out for its practical framing of policy debates, grounded in specific district examples and close attention to implementation details.
School boards and library policy battles
Tomasic spends significant time inside school board meetings, documenting how district leaders debate library access and curricular materials. In coverage of the Pine-Richland School Board, she reported on a controversial library policy that tightened oversight of book purchases through a detailed multi-page review process and required board approval. When that board later reversed its stance, she followed the policy’s final reading and narrow 5-4 vote, tracking how procedural steps translated into changes for students and staff. These stories show an emphasis on governance mechanics—policies, votes and formal language—rather than rhetoric alone.
Benefits, staffing and statewide initiatives
Her work often examines how new benefits and mandates affect staffing and budgets at the district level. In a piece on Allegheny County’s proposed paid parental leave program, she focused on how long teachers could be out—potentially up to half the school year—and what that would mean for coverage in classrooms. She reported on districts’ questions about substitute availability, continuity of instruction and the practical capacity to honor expanded leave without disrupting learning. In a feature on a state stipend program, she highlighted how financial support for educators intersects with recruitment and retention, centering the experience of a classroom instructor reacting to the new funding. Across these pieces, the through-line is the translation of statewide initiatives into staffing plans and the daily realities inside schools.
Marketing, school choice and enrollment pressure
Tomasic also tracks how competition and choice reshape district strategy. In her report on Western Pennsylvania school districts stepping up their marketing, she detailed how traditional public systems respond as more families weigh charter schools and other options. The story explored tactics such as branding efforts and outreach campaigns, linking them to enrollment trends and the financial implications for districts. This coverage treats school systems as organizations operating in a competitive environment, showing how administrators adapt to shifting student demand while trying to protect programs and services.
Instructional models, attendance and snow days
A recurring thread in her beat is the impact of instructional models on student attendance and routines. When looking into flexible instruction days compared with traditional snow days, she sought out community perspectives to understand how remote options change participation and engagement. The resulting work situates policy tools like virtual days within the reality of attendance patterns, technology access and family logistics.
Grounding in general assignment reporting
Before moving into a dedicated K-12 beat, Tomasic worked as a general assignment reporter covering township government and a local area school district. That background informs her current education reporting, which treats school systems as part of a broader civic landscape of public boards and agencies. It also shows in her comfort navigating meeting agendas, policy documents and budget materials across different institutions.
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.