Sarah Perkel

Sarah Perkel covers how South Florida’s education systems perform, change and intersect with broader economic and environmental pressures, using clear data and practical detail to show what policy decisions mean for local schools. She works as a South Florida Connect reporter on the Palm Beach Post’s Florida Connect team, part of the USA TODAY Network. Her reporting moves across K-12 and higher education, tracking statewide scorecards, district-level shifts and major investments in new campuses and infrastructure.

South Florida school performance and academic outcomes

Perkel devotes sustained attention to how South Florida school districts are graded and how students are performing over time, translating technical scorecards into accessible reporting. In one piece she lays out the Florida Department of Education’s “A” ratings for Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe districts, breaking those down into counts of A, B, C and F schools across the region and explaining the “student success measures” formula behind the grades.

Another story uses a national “learning recession” report to show that Florida ranks last among 35 states for academic growth in reading, detailing grade-equivalent declines since 2019 and contrasting those trends with more stable math performance. She drills into Palm Beach County’s test scores, comparing them with the U.S. average and with districts of similar socioeconomic status to show where scores and learning rates are improving, holding steady or slowing.

Across these pieces, the distinguishing feature is her emphasis on concrete numbers and comparative context, rather than isolated anecdotes.

Enrollment, staffing and day-to-day operations

Another strand of Perkel’s coverage follows the operational health of South Florida school districts, especially enrollment swings and staffing gaps. In a report on Palm Beach County, she documents a loss of almost 7,000 students over a single year, separating declines in traditional public schools from smaller drops in charter enrollment and spelling out how those shifts translate into funding losses and a district-wide hiring hold.

She includes specific enrollment counts for traditional and alternative programs at different points in time to show the scale and pace of the change. A separate story on hundreds of teacher vacancies as schools open uses vacancy numbers over multiple years to show how staffing pressure is evolving, situating the current shortage against previous August tallies. She also provides service-focused coverage of school calendars, listing start and end dates for districts such as Palm Beach County so families and staff can see schedules at a glance.

This operational work distinguishes her as a reporter who treats school systems as organizations with budgets, staffing and timelines, not just as backdrops for politics.

Higher education and major investments in learning

Perkel extends her education beat into higher education, focusing on rankings and large-scale philanthropic projects that reshape the region’s academic landscape.

In one story on national university rankings, she highlights how several Florida universities land in the top 100 of a major list, explaining the ranking methodology and citing measures such as graduation rates, first-year retention and earnings by major. She uses tuition figures and undergraduate enrollment numbers for institutions including the University of Florida, University of Miami, Florida State University, Florida International University and the University of South Florida to show both affordability and scale. In a co-bylined piece on Carnegie Mellon University’s new Miami campus, she details a multibillion-dollar donation by Ken Griffin, additional support from Stephen Ross, and the plan for a 35-acre site in Wynwood.

The story outlines projected construction and enrollment timelines and describes how the campus will organize learning around societal challenges such as health, national security and climate resilience. Together, these articles show her interest in how elite universities, wealthy donors and regional strategy converge to shape long-term opportunities for students.

Education’s overlap with environment and infrastructure

Perkel also reports at the intersection of education, environment and local development, often where schools sit next to controversial projects or climate risks. In an examination of a proposed AI data center, she explains why the project was rejected as incompatible with its surrounding community, noting that the site would have been near Saddle View Elementary School and tracing residents’ concerns about the facility and its impacts.

She has written multiple pieces on high tides and king tides in Palm Beach County and coastal flooding in South Florida, flagging when tides are expected to peak and what that means for neighborhoods and infrastructure. Her coverage of a wildfire burning more than 4,000 acres in Palm Beach County similarly tracks smoke conditions and burn area as they affect daily life.

While these stories sit in environment and public-safety territory, they fit her broader pattern of examining how physical and climate realities shape the communities that schools serve.

Across beats, Perkel’s work is defined by its use of specific metrics, timelines and locations to show how broad trends land on particular districts, campuses and neighborhoods. She moves readily between statewide scorecards, district operations, university ambitions and environmental pressures, but keeps the focus on what is happening on the ground in South Florida’s education landscape.