The Sleuthers - School Daze

A team of high school students investigate a new hire at their school. What they discover leads them towards an all out battle for the truth. Extra special thanks to Emily Smith and her team of sleuthers! Produced by Shaina Shealy, edited by Nancy Lopez, original score Nick Marks. Season 16 - Episode 46 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 2:19Glynn Washington?

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• 2:30Glynn Washington?

  In high school, I wanted to fight back against the man. The man was our principal. White shirt, blue suit, no nonsense. And our principal, like principals in every film you've ever seen, didn't take kindly to the likes of someone like me. Always talking about, "You're skating on thin ice, mister." Thin ice. Because I was all about the nonsense, the foolishness, the devilment. I just wanted to be me, man, you know? Principal said he followed me around, driving me crazy. I always imagined that he was the center of some global conspiracy out to subvert emerging leaders of tomorrow,

• 3:13Glynn Washington?

  singled me out from their headquarters in New York. Turns out that he was just a nice dude trying to keep things moving. But what if there really was a high school conspiracy? What if the man really was out to get you?

• 3:33Glynn Washington?

  Well, today on Snap Judgment, class is back in. The second episode of the new Snap series, School Days, Episode 2, The Sleuthers. My name is Glynn Washington. Tater tots are back on the menu when you're listening.

• 3:52Glynn Washington?

  The Snap Judgment.

• 4:15Glynn Washington?

  Our story takes us to the mean streets of Pittsburgh, Kansas. Small town right on the border of Missouri and Oklahoma. In this small town, there was a small group of high school students writing a small newspaper for their school. And one day, the students come across some information that kind of, sort of, maybe could be a big story. Shaina Shealy takes us there. Snap Judgment.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  It all started in March of 2016. A junior at Pittsburgh High, Maddie, walked past the cafeteria, past the gym, and into a room that opened into a garage that used to be used for an auto shop class.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  It was just like this huge back room that just had like a bunch of random stuff back there.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  There were rolling chairs and old newspapers. Maddie sat down in front of a big whiteboard with her co-editors of the Booster Redux, and they parsed out their assignments for the week.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  It was definitely fun. Like, newspaper was known as like the favorite class of the day.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Maddie's task? Interview the incoming new principal, Amy Robertson, which she was kind of nervous about.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  I felt like it was one of my bigger assignments. Everyone's gonna want to know who our new principal's going to be. And so it's gonna be my job to present her to our students and to the community.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Maddie was on the dance team and student council. Her three older siblings had also written for the school paper.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  And my siblings were editors, too. And so I thought it would just be cool to also follow in their footsteps.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Maddie found a quiet place in the newspaper classroom and called up her future principal, Dr. Amy Robertson.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  And she just sounded very excited to talk to me. And I was just excited. I was like, oh, this is gonna be my new principal. Like, I want to make sure I sound professional and make a good impression so that she knows me and enjoys the paper.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Maddie asked about Robertson's education, her professional experience.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  What are your goals for the school as a new principal? What do you want the students to know about?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Amy Robertson told Maddie that she was living in Dubai, where she had started a school. She had a PhD in English, and she was excited to get started at Pittsburgh High. Her flight from Dubai to Kansas was in April, less than a month away.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  I felt pretty confident that I had answers to all of my questions.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  The interview was short.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, very casual.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  The next day, Maddie went back to the newspaper room to transcribe the interview. Maddie paused when she got to the part of the interview where the future principal talked about her education.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Been like typing that she went to Corlins.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Two other editors, Gina and Callie, were sitting with Maddie. And we were like, huh, never heard of that. Callie was a junior. She joined the paper because Maddie, her best friend, was doing it. And now, they typed Corlins University into a search engine, and they clicked on the Corlins website.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And we were like, oh, whoa. There just really wasn't a lot of information on the website like you would find at like a normal university's website.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  The site was a single page with all these broken links and a string of payment options on the bottom.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  We were both were like, oh, again, that's kind of like a red flag. And like, where, where is this place? Like, does this place even exist?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  We brought it to our advisor, Emily Smith.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Emily Smith's newspaper class was coveted at Pittsburgh High. She basically built it up from scratch, and now, class had an application and a waitlist. Her students called her Smith, and Smith encouraged her students to write stories that meant something. They once wrote about how the cafeteria was overcrowded at lunchtime.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  And they changed the lunch structure from it.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  They wrote about a classmate who had died in a car crash, and students who were trading nude photos. These stories were recognized as two of the best high school newspaper stories in the whole country.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  We weren't specifically trying to be edgy about stuff. You know, we just focused on good storytelling.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  So when Maddie came to her for advice on what to do about this mysterious detail from her interview with the future principal.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  I coached Maddie on how to politely, you know, like, could you just answer these three follow-up questions?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  So I'm just going to read you what I said to her. Said, "Hi, Dr. Robertson. I had a couple more questions that I wanted to ask you about. The first one is about the universities you attended. Could you tell me what universities you went to get all of your degrees?"

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Maddie hit send and went off to volunteer at a blood drive. When she checked her phone later, she saw that Amy Robertson had responded to her email, but not in the way she'd expected.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  I definitely just like paused and I think like get like a little like lightheaded, just kind of freeze it and like hold my breath and I'm like, oh no, like what have I done? And I'm just kind of like in shock.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Maddie went to Smith and showed her the email. Smith was struck by the last sentence.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  "I am forwarding all of our correspondence to Superintendent Destry Brown because he ultimately has the final say in what goes in the school newspaper." I thought, wow. I remember laughing and saying, "He doesn't have final say of what goes in the newspaper, and welcome to Kansas."

• 10:40Speaker 01

  "Welcome to Kansas," as in, "Welcome to one of the few states in the country where students have free speech protections, similar to professional journalists."

• 10:51Speaker 03

  That last sentence is like burned into my brain because I was like, why? Why would you flip like this on this kid when they're asking such basic questions? And so in the back of my mind, I'm just kind of like fermenting on this.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Despite what everybody thinks, I'm really, deep down, I am a rule follower.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  And so I got a little stressed and I contacted my union rep.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And the two scheduled a meeting with the school superintendent, Destry Brown.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  And he said, "Don't worry about it. It's all fine. I got her transcripts today. Everything's fine." And I'm like, "Great."

• 11:41Speaker 01

  This was a moment where Smith could have trusted Brown and set this whole thing aside, gone on with her life. But when she got back to her newspaper classroom, the editors who had been working on Maddie's story wanted to know what was going on, why Robertson's credentials seemed questionable. Smith still couldn't give them an answer, so she pulled the editing team into the newspaper room. Maddie told them about her exchange with Dr. Robertson, and Smith told them what she knew or didn't know about Corlins.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  I turned to Maddie and I was like, "Is this the same principal that's coming in to teach us? Like, are we okay? What's going on?"

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Gina was one of the co-editors in that huddle. She was also a star of the Speech and Debate Team. She helped lead National Honor Society. She was in Spanish Club.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  In the rat race of high school, really?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Smith left the room to deal with the other students lined up at her desk. And together, they decided to do a deep dive into Robertson's education.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  The editors pulled out their computers. They typed in "Corlins University."

• 12:43Speaker 05

  None of us had heard of it. And obviously, we were like 18 years old. We hadn't heard of a lot of universities.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Trina was the only senior on the editing team. She loved writing. She played tennis and had a lot of thoughts on politics in the world. When she typed Corlins into Google...

• 12:59Speaker 05

  The first words that popped up were like "Diploma Mills."

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Diploma Mill, a business that presents itself as a legit educational institution where you can get a degree that might not be legit.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  And I think that we were just like, "What?"

• 13:23Speaker 01

  That same class period, Maddie got another email from Dr. Robertson. This one had a bunch of attachments: a pamphlet about Robertson's business as an educational consultant, and contracts with redacted names of her clients. Gina downloaded the documents and saw that the redactions were simply black highlights.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  And we realized we could just change the color of the highlight, and it revealed the information that was redacted. And to me, that was just part of the tech savviness of our age, again, of just growing up in this digital world. To us, that was a security check that was not difficult to get through.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  When they started searching for those clients, they couldn't find any proof that they'd existed at all. When they searched the school she started in Dubai, they told me that it got shut down for violating regulations.

• 14:24Speaker 05

  And then we did a simple reverse Google image search.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  They searched the images that Robertson had included on the pamphlet about her business.

• 14:32Speaker 05

  And they were just stock images.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  The students found that Robertson had used pictures of a graduation ceremony at Juilliard on her pamphlet. They also found that some of the descriptions were taken from existing websites.

• 14:44Speaker 05

  There were clearly aspects of her resume or some of the materials that were shared with us that were plagiarized.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  We're kind of like, how could someone have missed this? And I do think that there was a tentativeness, because we're all fairly young, and it just seemed like a mistake that could have been caught relatively quickly. It was just a very odd situation for us to be in, given that we were teenagers.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  When Smith got back to the classroom...

• 15:22Speaker 03

  The girls are in it enough that like, they know that there's something going on. We're talking like, this was maybe like 45 minutes or an hour, because this is like one class period. I remember I stuck my head in the other room and I was looking at all this newspaper staff students like, who can help them with this stuff?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Smith looked around the newspaper classroom and her eyes landed on two juniors, Patrick and Connor.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  I was probably sitting there doing very little of importance at that point.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Connor got into journalism because he liked the idea of sports writing and a classroom where you didn't have to stay in one seat the whole time. Smith called him over to the editor's huddle in the garage room.

• 16:05Speaker 06

  Everybody's kind of hunched over around the desk and like, kind of filled us in on what was going on.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Smith got these six students excused from their classes for the rest of the morning, and they came up with a plan to find out as much information as they could about Corlins and Robertson's background.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  First, Connor looked at the address for Corlins University on Google Street View.

• 16:34Speaker 06

  The address that we had was like, a factory, or like, a warehouse, or something like that.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Then Gina left a request with the City of Stockton to call her. It's where Corlins was registered.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  And when my phone rang, I like, rushed into this back, back room and was like, pressed up against some filing cabinets. I was like, hello? I explained that I was a student journalist, looking into Corlins University, and she looked through her records and she said, "I'm not finding anything. Do you know who told you this information?" As in, was I getting false information to, to give her? And I said, "Oh no, I just wanted to, to confirm, has there ever been a Corlins University in Stockton, California?" And she said, "Not to my records."

• 17:30Speaker 04

  I opened the door, rushed out of that side room and was eager to share what I'd found, just to add to our collective fact-finding process.

• 17:45Speaker 06

  That was kind of like, this is actually getting kind of a real moment.

• 17:55Speaker 04

  It was just one thing after another. One call, one Google search, one, you know, contradiction led to another. And we, in our shared doc, were just putting comments on the sides.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  By lunchtime, they knew. They had enough information to know that, like, something was really wrong. And I said, "What do you want to do? You can write the story, you can talk to superintendent, you can pretend it never happened. What do you want to do?" And they talked about it for a long time and they said, "We think we need to tell the superintendent."

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Robertson was supposed to get to Kansas in just a few weeks. And the students worried that if they didn't share their findings with the school superintendent, then other people would.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Like, if us high school students found this, like, think about what other parents or families are going to find.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  So, Smith arranged the meeting. And a few days later, Superintendent Brown came down to the newspaper classroom with boxes of pepperoni pizzas.

• 19:13Speaker 04

  When he walked in and sat down in front of us, the room was very quiet.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  They had all the pages printed out.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  We had, like, all of the documents, like, out on the table.

• 19:25Speaker 04

  And so, someone slid some papers over to him across the wooden desk.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Like, "Have you seen this? But can you, like, tell us about this?"

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Superintendent Brown looked through the documents that called Corlins a diploma mill.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  At the end of looking through the few papers, he sort of nodded.

• 19:47Speaker 07

  We told him all these things and he's like, "No worries."

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Keith pretty much just said, "I've seen you done your research, but you just have to trust us and know that she's going to be the principal."

• 20:07Speaker 03

  And I remember when he left, how silent it was and the way everybody was just looking at each other like, "This did not go the way they thought it was going to go."

• 20:15Speaker 07

  He left and we were pissed that he's going to bring us pizza and then pretend like everything's fine. Because we wanted it to be believed and we also wanted it taken off our hands.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Superintendent Brown suggested that if the students still had questions, they should sit down and interview their future principal, Dr. Robertson. When Maddie got home that day and told her parents about what had happened, they seemed kind of freaked out.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  I think you guys should leave this to somebody else. I don't think it's... You guys should be doing it.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  But Maddie couldn't let it go.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  I think I had this... Started to have this weird feeling of like, she really just does not sound like who she says she is. I was just scared of what maybe could have happened to the school. If we have someone that comes in as our principal and lies about things, she's not going to be that authority person that is able to make our school run the way it should.

• 21:36Glynn Washington?

  With all these lies and deceptions, what will the students decide to do? Find out after the break.

• 21:55Glynn Washington?

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• 24:13Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment's School Days, the sleuthers' episode. When we left, the students were questioning their new principal. They were nervous about what the new hire might mean for their school.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  So over the next few days, these six newspaper students prepared their questions.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Like, how can we best ask them in a way that's not accusing and how we can... Because, again, we're high schoolers.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  It was sort of the one opportunity we had to either verify or nullify our findings.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  And we were going into it with the expectation that there was going to be essentially truth that was laid out in this meeting.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Finally, it was March 16. The interview was that morning. The students took their seats in an empty classroom.

• 25:14Speaker 07

  And we had her interview pulled up on the computer, which was then projected onto the whiteboard. And we're sitting in this ark, just with our questions ready.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  They were armed with facts and a shared Google Doc.

• 25:28Speaker 04

  So it felt like we were bracing for impact to really be point blank about these concerns.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  And then Superintendent Brown walked in and sat in the front of the room.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  While an IT guy was getting Skype set up to start the call, Brown told the students.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm going to be the one who is leading this interview. It wasn't what we had planned. We were going to be the ones that were leading it.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Smith was in the back, just sweating.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  They're looking at me to make sure things are OK. So I'm trying to reassure them, like, it's going to be OK. You guys have done nothing wrong.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Smith recorded the entire meeting.

• 26:22Speaker 08

  Hi, Amy. How are you today? Oh, good. I can see you had no movement. Okay.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Superintendent Brown takes the lead.

• 26:32Speaker 08

  Uh, let's talk about Corlins.

• 26:34Speaker 09

  Uh, when I went to Corlins, my plan had 1090. I graduated in 2004 with the MA.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Robertson starts explaining the process she went through to get her degree accredited in the United Arab Emirates.

• 26:48Speaker 09

  The big process, about $1,500. That's what each degree costs to be educated. You said you had...

• 26:56Speaker 04

  Smith was saying in our running doc in the side comments, she's like, be assertive, be assertive, ask this question, ask this question. Just trying to really encourage us as students to like use our voices because it felt like we were disempowered in that moment.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Nearly half an hour in, and the students haven't asked a single question. Until finally...

• 27:17Speaker 08

  Connor's gonna ask you a question about Corlins.

• 27:19Speaker 06

  Uh, you said you took a few classes on the campus of Corlins. Where was the campus at?

• 27:24Speaker 09

  Yeah. I just answered that. Stockton, California. Is there a website that we can look at for that information? Uh, I'm sure there is.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Trina pushes back.

• 27:37Speaker 09

  Whenever I look it up, I can't find an address in Stockton, California. There's no physical address. There's just maybe like one Facebook page, and that's it. Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 08

  Where are...

• 27:50Speaker 09

  I don't know. I just said I haven't, I haven't been back. I haven't talked to anyone there in seven years.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Connor asks, if you haven't been in contact with them, how do you get your transcripts?

• 28:02Speaker 09

  My transcripts were sent to me when I graduated in, in 2010.

• 28:07Speaker 06

  Is that standard practice?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  The students keep pushing. They say that usually, an official transcript request has to go through the school. Like, Corlins would have to send the school the transcript. Robertson can't just send a copy of it herself. And Superintendent Brown steps in, saying that the school's waiting for Robertson to come there to request the actual transcript.

• 28:30Speaker 08

  That isn't unusual. That's how we work with any out-of-state people.

• 28:35Speaker 09

  That's the normal practice.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  As the interview went on, we felt like we were... Just getting more questions than answers. And we felt uncomfortable speaking up or asking some of our more invasive questions with an administrator in the room.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  The students ask her why there isn't any proof of her consulting company. They ask where she lived in the 90s when she was getting her PhD at Corland. Dr. Robertson says she had an apartment in New York City in the Upper West Side, but actually she lived in Spain at the time, all while taking classes in California, where her Aunt Linda was living.

• 29:14Speaker 08

  And at the time, she wasn't married, now she is remarried. I lived with my Aunt Linda and Dr. Robertson, my daughter, my girlfriend, I would have to... Asking that question, I think is... I mean, why does anybody choose to go to the school they go to, honestly?

• 29:34Speaker 04

  We had our running dock open in that moment. And at the top of it, and like bold and highlighted, was Destry Yells at Connor at this timestamp. And we were really like, just shocked that our superintendent was sort of sweeping all these allegations under the rug without taking them seriously.

• 29:59Speaker 08

  I'm just asking.

• 30:01Speaker 06

  They choose that school generally because they want the quality of affordable education. I just don't see how...

• 30:06Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 30:07Speaker 06

  It's just in the mirror. It's just, it's kind of odd to me, it's all.

• 30:12Speaker 08

  Okay, we've exhausted this part, so let's talk about...

• 30:16Speaker 01

  The interview lasts for nearly another hour.

• 30:20Speaker 08

  Thank you, Amy. Thank you. Thank you.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  The call ends.

• 30:29Speaker 08

  What other more questions you have?

• 30:32Speaker 09

  That was just a lot of information for our own allies.

• 30:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, so seven years ago, when we hired Mr. Bishop, of course, we did go through all of this process. No other employee I've ever hired has had to go through the process you just put her through. Not even me. And so you need to understand, I have really gone out on a limb here, allowing you to have that freedom to ask those questions.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Superintendent Brown left the room and the students just looked at one another.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  We were just so overwhelmed. I said, we're going to go off campus and talk about this.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  The students piled into cars and went to a nearby burger restaurant called The Pit. They placed their lunch orders and before the food came...

• 31:31Speaker 03

  They start pulling out their phones. And so one kid called the Department of Education at Kansas and the other kid recorded it while they had it on speaker. The Department of Education had said, we would not acknowledge any of her credentials and she's not eligible for a Kansas principal license.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  And we're like 16-year-olds and we're trying to call these universities to verify this information. Like it just, it felt bigger than our scope than anything that we had done before.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  One student called Pitt State to ask if they'd have accepted credits from Corlins University.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  And I remember the lady was like, well, hold on. And I remember she got back on the phone and she said, honey, have you given money to this school? I hope you have not given any money to this place because it is not an accredited institution and you will not get any of those credits.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Connor called the University of Tulsa where Robertson reportedly had received her undergrad degree.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  And they were like, we've never offered that degree. Like that degree is not available here.

• 32:44Speaker 06

  Like I remember that call being on speaker and the registrar saying that and hanging up and everyone just like slack-jawed.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  The students were floored.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Not only had they discovered that Corlins, where she said her masters and PhD was from, was not accredited, but now they also had questions about her undergraduate degree.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  They could not ignore the information they had unmasked, but they would have to wait because the next day was the start of spring break.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  In this small town, rumors started going around. Adults had also searched Amy Robertson's name on the internet.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Surely, somebody else is going to get involved and like, the adults are going to step in and do the adult thing.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  She hoped that someone on the board would look into Robertson's credentials. But when they got back to school from spring break...

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Crickets. And at this point, there's all kinds of gossip going around, students and adults alike, that resulted in an emergency staff meeting.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  And we go to this staff meeting and I'm like hiding in the back because I'm very tall. I'm almost six foot. And I'm like not wanting to make eye contact with anybody.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  The superintendent told the entire teaching staff, "Do you know how hard it is to hire a principal? Stop trying to interrupt my hiring process. Stop contacting board members. Stop writing letters to the local newspaper and everything's going to be fine."

• 34:53Speaker 03

  And I left that meeting and I was like, "My goodness, what's going to hap-" like, something has to happen.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  I just remember the one class period when I'd walked in and Smith sort of looked around the room. She beckoned to the editors in chief and some writers to go to the back room. And we all sort of shuffled in and she shut the door behind her. And this was at the start of the class, and so we were really curious what was going on. And she told us very frankly that she was going to recuse herself. She left it up to the students essentially to say, hey, this is important information. Do with it what you will.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  I didn't want people to think that I was pumping all this information to the students. And two, I wanted their reporting to be able to stand on its own accountability.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  And three, she was worried. When she went to the Student Press Law Center, an organization that supports free press for student journalists and their advisors, members of the organization had advised Smith to recuse herself from the story.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  And so we were at like a very critical point of like, do we want to look into this? Is it even our place as students? What should we do here?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  In that moment, it was like, oh, man, like, this is just us, like totally on us.

• 36:32Speaker 07

  I didn't want to create any issues or challenges or anything like that. Like, I just wanted to be your middle of the road, like, straight A student. It was that hard feeling of, like, I don't really want to write this.

• 36:45Speaker 04

  There could actually be fallout from this story.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Trina went home and spoke to her parents about it. Her parents are from Bangladesh.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  And Pittsburgh, Kansas, is a predominantly white town. And it's like, my parents kind of had this, not the sense of being an imposter, but of like...

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Like, we don't want to step out or like, yeah, or rock the boat in any way. And they're very much like, you shouldn't be writing a story like this.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  This was four days before the school newspaper print deadline. And it wasn't just any print deadline. It was the last one before school was out for the summer. Meaning, if they didn't hit this deadline, they'd have to wait until next year to get their story out. By then, Principal Robertson would have moved to Kansas from Dubai. She would be in charge.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Two days before the print deadline, the students met in the newspaper garage room.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  We've done research. We have evidence. Like, just be confident and go for it.

• 38:02Speaker 07

  This doesn't just affect us and our staff. It also affects all of the other kids and like our whole community. We need to share this information that we've done all the work to find. So let's use it.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  And they made a decision. All six students were in.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  The hope was that now our facts would be taken seriously. And then some of the adults would take this out of our hands, you know, and do right by the information.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Smith found a highly respected local journalist to step in and work with them on the story. And that journalist pushed them to double check all their sources to make sure the investigation was airtight. The students went into the garage and closed the door.

• 38:47Speaker 07

  I remember seeing people like kind of peeping in or like, you know, staring at us like, but we were definitely eating into our other class periods. Like, we couldn't stop.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  There were also a lot of laughs.

• 39:05Speaker 06

  At one point, our superintendent says something about us sleuthing. And so we would always call ourselves sleuths in the same intonation that he would, where it was very sleuthin', like I-N apostrophe and not I-N-G.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  We always were like, "We're the sleuthers."

• 39:27Speaker 06

  Like a sleuthin'.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  The first draft came together hours before the print deadline.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  And we were basically just running through the story, reading it aloud, line by line, to make sure we were saying what we wanted to say.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  I remember Gina was literally typing out edits. Our graphic designer was just sitting there waiting for her. We were way past our deadline to the printer.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  As the sun set over the school building.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  I was like, "Oh, no."

• 40:08Speaker 02

  "Is it OK that my name's on this? Is this going to hurt me? I'm gonna get expelled. I'm gonna have to move to a new school."

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Callie sent PDF versions of the piece to a bunch of local journalists. Gina and the graphic designer formatted the piece for the paper and hit "Send to the Printer."

• 40:28Speaker 07

  Here we go.

• 40:31Speaker 07

  It just felt like time froze, almost, of just not knowing what's going to come next.

• 40:47Glynn Washington?

  What is going to happen when people see what these students have written?

• 40:53Glynn Washington?

  Stay tuned.

• 41:02Glynn Washington?

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• 41:45Glynn Washington?

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• 41:59Glynn Washington?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Americans United has spent the last 80 years defending your right to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Through film screenings, speaking engagements, and valuable resources like the Know Your Rights and Public School Guides, AU empowers people nationwide to recommit to the separation of church and state, protecting individual freedoms and strengthening our democracy for all. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more at au.org/TENC.

• 42:52Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is Glynn Washington, and when last we left, these teenage journalists had just printed a very big edition of their high school paper.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  And the next day, they all woke up to their alarms, got to school, and met up in the newspaper room to get a first look at the paper before it went out.

• 43:17Speaker 06

  It definitely felt more crisp than usual.

• 43:21Speaker 07

  Just having that in our hands and really being able to, you know, you see the ink come off on your fingers and it just kind of was like this surreal moment. Like, wow, we did this.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  The students stood in a circle silently reading their words on paper.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  Following the hiring of incoming Pittsburgh High School principal, Dr. Amy Robertson, on March 6th, discrepancies arose between Robertson's personal accounts of her education and information provided by education institutions she said she attended.

• 43:56Speaker 07

  And then, as we got done, people just kind of started like looking up and looking at each other,

• 44:02Speaker 07

  kind of processing like what we just had done and kind of feeling some of the excitement. And I just remember like seeing so many people on that page and just having their newspaper fully open and just reading it. Like, it just felt bigger than any other newspaper.

• 44:20Speaker 06

  I saw people sitting at cafeteria desks. I saw people standing in hallways. I saw people kind of standing like in like the front lobby of the school, like in circles with their friends, like actually reading.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  As the day went on, the students waited for some kind of response.

• 44:46Speaker 06

  I think one of the worst feelings, though, was when we published and then just nothing really happened. And that was just really deflating.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  And we didn't hear a single word from anybody. And we didn't hear anything all day Friday from any journalists.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  The next day, on a Saturday afternoon, a local newspaper published an online story about the article.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  The headline read, "Brown Refutes Claims in School Paper. Superintendent Maintains New Principal Highly Qualified, Best Candidate."

• 45:24Speaker 06

  They just refuted everything.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  And that was kind of like, whoa. Like, oh, man, like, all of our hard work and now no one's like gonna believe it, kind of?

• 45:34Speaker 06

  And that just sucked. It was really sad. We were like, is that really how it ends?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  But this is a high school story. Prom was that very evening. Hours after that disappointing op-ed, the students walked into an auditorium.

• 45:53Speaker 07

  It definitely felt a little bit like a movie scene, especially with like the whole masquerade setup. And just, all of it just seemed so fitting that it was comical.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  The theme of prom that year, I kid you not, was masquerade.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  They had like a little like photo booth where they had like masks. And so we all like took a picture like with masks on. And we're just kind of like the inside joke of like, like we're the sleuthers who like, who, who wrote the story.

• 46:23Speaker 07

  Then we danced and we partied and like just kind of have a laugh about the whole thing.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  These six student journalists were back to just being high school students, celebrating the school year together.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Until Monday, when a reporter at the Kansas City Star published an article about how these students reported their story.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  And again, kind of like confirmed what we had said.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  The school board called for an emergency board meeting the following day.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Smith was like, you guys need to go down there. You guys are the ones who did the reporting. You guys need to be there to hear what they have to say about it.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  It was a Tuesday night, April 4th.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  So we all met up at this board meeting, knowing that we were going to get some answer from the board about the work that we had done as it was on the agenda.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  And it's myself and the six students and one other staff member and her dad. And they were not happy to see any of us.

• 47:27Speaker 04

  It was an unusually full room. A few local news organizations in the corners. Every chair was filled and so it became standing room only.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  And so, once again, I'm hiding in the back and the superintendent's standing there in front of all the teaching staff.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  And I was checking my watch and minutes before they were moving to a short Q and A period had brought up Dr. Robertson's resignation. I believe the Chair of the Board held up a letter and read a prepared statement saying that Dr. Robertson had resigned on her own accord.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  He's like, "I stand here before you to tell you that Amy Robertson, she was supposed to turn in a transcript for her undergrad degree. Nobody had heard from her and she had 24 hours to respond."

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Amy Robertson didn't turn in a transcript and she would no longer be the next principal of Pittsburgh High.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  No one really acknowledged the story, kind of acknowledged the reasons that, again, she resigned. And so I think it just overall felt very, yeah, very weird.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  And so then, that was it. Like, nobody talked to them, nobody said anything.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  But news of these teenagers' investigations had spread beyond their small town, beyond Kansas. And after the board meeting that night, Connor's phone rang.

• 49:17Speaker 06

  It was late in the evening at this point and I was, like, having a bowl of cheeses or something. I got a call from a number I didn't recognize and it was a reporter at The Washington Post. I just went and woke up my mom. I was like, "Some reporter at The Washington Post just called me." And I, that, I think, was the moment where I think the dam broke.

• 49:47Speaker 10

  Investigative reporting by a group of student journalists forced their new principal to resign.

• 49:51Speaker 11

  Student journalists started asking questions about Amy Robertson, and they found things out that the school board did not.

• 49:58Speaker 12

  They are the intrepid student journalists being hailed today for uncovering the nasty truth about their new principal.

• 50:04Speaker 13

  A group of students had their doubts about their new principal, so they did a little digging into her resume.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  But when the national media outlets left their little town in Kansas, these six students looked around and saw that some of the grownups around them wished they'd kept this story to themselves.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  So many people blamed the kids and me for what happened. And people thought I should have censored them and prohibited them from printing the story.

• 50:38Speaker 07

  I feel like a lot of it has to do with pride.

• 50:42Speaker 07

  Like, how embarrassing that our school board didn't vet this well enough, and now these high schoolers are exposing it to the community.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  And it caused me some discomfort just because I attributed that blame to me. Like, I was responsible for inviting some of this antagonism, or I was creating, you know, upheaval in the community in some way. There was some sort of distrust that we had created at the community level of how our schools were running.

• 51:23Speaker 07

  As high school students, especially as these straight A students who just want to be respectful and like how their teachers like them and whatever else, like, I think it was really tough for us to overcome the idea that not everyone was going to be pleased with our story.

• 51:57Glynn Washington?

  Emily Smith left her job at Pittsburgh High a few years after the investigation to focus on her family and is now registered as a candidate for school board in the fall. Callie graduated and went on to become an elementary school teacher. Connor just graduated from law school. Gina's getting her master's in international relations and Maddie teaches third grade. Trina is the only one of the six students who went on to work in journalism. She went to Swarthmore where she wrote on the university's paper about frat culture on campus and an allegedly abusive basketball coach. And she's now sleuthing in New York City as a professional journalist.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  And for me, it felt like empowering to be able to do that, to realize that like I had a voice and that people were willing to listen.

• 52:51Glynn Washington?

  Extra special thanks to Emily Smith and her team of sleuthers. The original score for that story was by Nick Marks. It was produced by Shaina Shealy.

• 53:16Glynn Washington?

  Oh, good news. Good news, snappers. There is more because this is just episode two of the Snap Judgment School Days series on the next school days after graduation. For a full decade, one guy's life is nothing but a series of disappointments. He decides a fresh start is in order. Figures he still looks young. Nobody would ever know. So he returns to where everything went wrong and enrolls in high school again.

• 53:48Glynn Washington?

  Yep. That's on the next School Days episode from Snap Judgment. If you missed even a moment of Snap School Days series, you are in luck to listen on the Snap Judgment Podcast because Snap rocks podcast platforms everywhere. Snap Judgment. Yellow Brick Road passes through KQED in San Francisco. No Snap Studios content may be used for training, testing, or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission. Take that, Skynet! Snap is brought to you by the team commanding the emancipation of flying monkeys. Except, of course, for the uber producer, Mr. Mark Wistich. He doesn't believe in defying gravity.

• 54:33Glynn Washington?

  On Team Snap, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers, and members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, Local 51. And there's Nancy Lopez, Pat McMillan, Anna Sussman, Rensel Goryo, John Facil, Shayna Shealy, Taylor Decot, Flo Wiley, Bo Walsh, Marissa Dodge, and Regina Bediako.

• 55:02Glynn Washington?

  Now, this is not the news. No way is this the news. In fact, you could take your high school yearbook out to reminisce about your old martial arts teacher, realize suddenly that you never had a martial arts teacher because you never took martial arts and the bully never tried to steal your girlfriend. All that was in that Karate Kid movie. And you would still, still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is PRX.