On April 3, Amy Robertson, newly named principal of Pittsburg High School in Kansas, resigned.

An investigation into Robertson’s background uncovered questionable credentials.

And the best part?

Student journalists for Booster Redux, the high school newspaper at Pittsburg High, conducted the investigation.

In news coverage of the students’ work, reporters noted adults on the school board who vetted Robertson’s application and supporting materials as well as seasoned journalists who covered the school district did not uncover the inconsistencies in Robertson’s record.

Under the headline “High school journalists reveal their principal is a fraud,” “New York Post” journalist Joshua Rhett Miller quoted Maddie Baden, a junior at the school and one of the investigating journalists. The students found Robertson’s advanced degrees, including a doctorate, likely came from a diploma mill, a for-profit college or university in name only which grants degrees for minimum work and a price tag and that the institution in Dubai where she last held a job as principal shuttered its doors in 2013 after Dubai officials rated the school as “unsatisfactory”

“That raised a red flag,” Baden said.

Since then the students have seen their story told in such varied media outlets as NBC’s Today, FOX News, “The Washington Post” and “The Kansas City Star” in their home state. Todd Wallack, one of the enterprising reporters celebrated in the Academy Award winning film “Spotlight” about the team of journalists at “The Boston Globe” who investigated the cover up of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church, reached out to the students, retweeting their story,

Robertson, it is reported, thought it best to resign given the scrutiny.

The Pittsburg Community Schools Board of Education has reopened the search for the job of principal of Pittsburg High School.

And all this comes when journalism, as a profession, and the work journalists do has increasingly been under fire.

Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, has said of journalism: “People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.”

One of my journalism teachers lived by the adage credited to “Chicago Evening Post” journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne in his satirical character Mr. Dooley. “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Journalists for the Booster Redux have done just that. Professor Underwood would be pleased.

April Peterson

editorial assistant

East Penn Press

Salisbury Press