Moya Dillon
Moya Dillon is a reporter with the Durham Region community news outlet, covering education and local public issues with a focus on how institutional decisions affect everyday life for students, families and neighbourhoods. Her work on school expansion, milestone school anniversaries and student experiences anchors her coverage in the physical and social environments where learning happens. She combines straightforward explanatory reporting with on-the-ground detail, making complex local changes easy to understand.
Education reporting and student life
Dillon’s core beat centres on education, with a particular interest in how school facilities and planning shape the experience of students and staff. In her coverage of the planned expansion at Courtice Catholic high school, she explains what the project means for classroom space, enrolment capacity and the surrounding community, focusing on concrete changes and timelines rather than generalities. She brings a similar attention to detail to stories about school milestones, such as the 50-year anniversary of Valley View Public School in Greenwood, where she highlights the history of the school and its place in the community. Her education reporting extends into profiles of individual students, including a feature on Ajax student Anna Ho, who spent her high school years balancing budgets and learning to cook for herself instead of concentrating only on typical teenage concerns.
This mix of facility-focused coverage and student narratives shows an education beat that treats schools as both buildings and social ecosystems.
Dillon also links education to youth health and development. In a piece on getting kids moving in Durham, she reports on the importance of instilling a lifelong love of fitness in children, framing physical activity as part of their broader growth and wellbeing. She covers youth-focused initiatives and campaigns that intersect with schooling and extracurricular life, using clear, practical language to explain what programs exist and how families can access them.
Across these stories, she keeps the emphasis on what changes for young people in concrete terms - whether that is more space in a high school, a new program teaching life skills, or local efforts to keep children active.
Community safety, policing and civic responsibility
Alongside education, Dillon regularly reports on community safety and policing, often tying these themes back to how residents experience policy on the ground. Her coverage of Durham police’s Festive RIDE impaired driving program details the number of people charged with drinking and driving offences and compares campaign totals year over year, underscoring the scale of the issue and the need for community support. She has written on convenience store alcohol sales, reporting on a petition to loosen restrictions and explaining how proposed changes would affect everyday purchasing and local regulation.
In her work on voter turnout, she examines the long-term downward trend in participation, quoting experts who are not hopeful about reversing the pattern despite recent upticks, and connects turnout data to feelings of apathy among groups less likely to vote.
Dillon’s safety coverage also includes immersive reporting and sensitive human stories.
In one article, she suits up with Pickering firefighter recruits and uses the Jaws of Life to cut into a car, describing the training exercise from first-hand experience. This kind of participation allows her to explain technical procedures in plain language while showing what front-line work looks like.
In a later piece, she reports from a nondescript brick home used by Durham Mental Health Crisis services, detailing how the service helps residents with mental illness access resources in the community and what support looks like behind a simple exterior.
More recently, her story on an outbreak of online hate in Clarington focuses on residents calling for support and a “path forward” after harmful activity on Facebook, grounding the issue in named platforms and local responses rather than abstract debate. Across these articles, Dillon treats safety as both enforcement and care, covering police campaigns, crisis services and digital harms with the same concrete approach.
Municipal projects, public spaces and infrastructure
Dillon devotes significant attention to municipal projects and the reshaping of public spaces. Her reporting on the overhaul of Frenchman’s Bay harbour in Pickering follows the project through approvals, funding and community reaction, documenting residents’ ongoing concerns even after formal approvals are in place. In related coverage of plans to revamp the surrounding waterfront, she outlines the scale of the proposed changes and how councillors support recommendations with revisions, showing the push and pull between vision and local scrutiny. She has reported on the opening of a public information office for the Hwy 407 east extension in Whitby, explaining how the office serves as a resource for residents with questions or concerns about the project.
These stories emphasise accessibility of information and the practical implications of infrastructure decisions.
Her more recent “What’s going on here?” format pieces keep the same focus at a smaller scale. In an article about new pickleball courts coming to Stuart Park in Courtice, she answers direct questions about what is being built, where, and for whom, while noting that she is a reporter with the Durham Region outlet.
By walking readers through the specifics of recreational projects, she treats parks and courts as part of the broader civic landscape, not minor additions. Together, her harbour, highway and park coverage form a consistent thread: Dillon follows projects from planning to impact, tracking how public spaces change and what those changes mean for nearby residents.
Human interest and community initiatives
Human interest reporting runs through Dillon’s work, often intersecting with education, wellness and local campaigns.
She has written about a Pickering mother working to change the image of a princess by making and selling tutu purses for little girls, using a small business story to explore how parents challenge traditional stereotypes. In Uxbridge, she covers the community’s milestone of reaching 50 per cent organ donation registration, noting that the area has the highest registration rates in the region and presenting the achievement as a collective wellness effort. Her coverage of campaigns and initiatives typically includes clear figures and simple explanations of what milestones represent, avoiding jargon.
Dillon’s broader professional background includes experience as a community reporter for local newspapers, which reinforces her focus on hyperlocal stories and practical information. Across beats - schools, safety, infrastructure and community initiatives - she keeps the reporting format straightforward: explain what is happening, provide relevant numbers or timelines, and connect changes to the people who live with them.
That consistency of approach, applied to education as her primary beat and to adjacent public issues, is what distinguishes her from a generic reporter working the same terrain.
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.