Silke Jasso
A group of Kansas high school students has done the unthinkable. They ousted their own principal.
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In what can only be characterized as “Ferris Bueller” with a dose Woodward and Bernstein, the students at Pittsburg High School’s newspaper, the Booster Redux, uncovered some discrepancies in their new principal’s past.
On Tuesday night, at a closed meeting, the president of the school board announced that newly-hired Amy Robertson had resigned. Her resignation followed an investigation by student journalists that revealed Robertson had lied about her credentials. Trina Paul, the editor of the school paper, told the Kansas City Star, “[Robertson] was going to be the head of our school, and we wanted be assured that she was qualified and had the proper credentials…we stumbled on some things that most might not consider legitimate credentials.”
On Friday, Booster Redux published a story that cast doubt on the legitimacy of Corllins University–the school where Robertson claimed that she earner her doctorate degree. Corllins is actually a “diploma mill” rather than an actual university. In reality, the principal’s highest degree was a bachelors that she earned at the University of Tulsa.
Though Robertson resigned, she remains adamant that her degree is legitimate. In an email response to the Star, she wrote, “All three of my degrees have been authenticated by the US government…I have no comment in response to the questions posed by PHS students regarding my credentials because their concerns are not based on facts.”
Six students worked for three weeks to uncover Robertson’s past. She was previously a principal at a school in Dubai but that fell through after the agency governing education there declared that she was unfit for the job. Emily Smith, the faculty adviser for the paper, said she is proud of her students and stressed that they “were not out to get anyone to resign or get fired. They worked very hard to uncover the truth.”
Here are the Pittsburg High School student journalists who discovered their new principal had shady credentials: https://t.co/GZmMcucvSR pic.twitter.com/cPWE3DXtk3
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) April 5, 2017
https://twitter.com/terri_rupar/status/849575419036803072
Great investigative work by high school journalists. https://t.co/X8ej4bK9lQ
— Todd Wallack (@TWallack) April 4, 2017
Students who worked to uncover the story have been thrust into the national spotlight and praised by journalists throughout the nation. Todd Wallack, a reporter for the Boston Globe’s prestigious Spotlight Team wrote on Twitter, “Great investigative work by high school journalists.” Five of the six students are juniors, but it’ll be tough for them to top this achievement next year.
