At most high schools, the student newspaper is responsible for goofy features on the editors’ friends and inoffensive articles about how it just snowed a lot.
Not at Pittsburg (KS) High School.
There, a team of student journalists last week published an expose on their new principal, Amy Robertson, noting that the university where she claimed to have received two degrees, Collins University, was an unaccredited diploma mill.
The result of that investigation: Robertson was forced to resign from her $93,000-job under pressure from the Board of Education. Via the Kansas City Star:
“She was going to be the head of our school, and we wanted be assured that she was qualified and had the proper credentials,” said Trina Paul, a senior and an editor of the Booster Redux, the school newspaper. “We stumbled on some things that most might not consider legitimate credentials.”
According to the Star, the whole thing started because students Google-searched Robertson’s name and found some articles about a school she had run in Dubai that closed amid “unsatisfactory” inspections. They kept poking around and eventually discovered that Corllins University was quite dubious.
It’s really pretty crazy that none of the adults vetting Robertson noticed that her credentials were phony. The Pittsburg school board will now look for a new principal, and you can bet he or she will be very nice to the student reporters.
Maybe one day this story can be made into a movie. We’ll call it, All the Principal’s Men.
