Pittsburg High School Newspaper Exposes Fake Principle, Forces Resignation

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April 6th, 2017

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Nicklaus Bartelli

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         On March 6th Kansas USD 250 hired Dr. Amy Robertson to fill the position of principal at Pittsburg High School, after Jon Bishop resigned to take a position at another institution. On April 4th, nearly a month later, the school board accepted the resignation of Amy Robertson before she ever stepped on the grounds as an administrator. The school board owes credit to the Pittsburg High School Booster Redux, the school publications team, for their extensive work in breaking open the story on a potentially fraudulent leader of their school.

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         “I think what needed to happen ultimately happened, but it took some time to get there,” said Kansas National Education Association Teachers Union Representative for southeast Kansas Tony White. “The real heroes this week have been the student staff of the Booster, they have utilized their training and walked the talk better than most adults would.”

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The link to the original Booster story, as of the day of the resignation of Amy Robertson, had been accessed over 3,200 times, more than the amount of votes the recent school bond issue received.

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Several state and national news sources have jumped onto the scene at Pittsburg High School after reading the high school kids’ work. The Topeka Capitol-Journal, the Kansas City Star, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Spotlight Team at the Boston Globe have acknowledged or written about the Booster story.

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Todd Wallack of the Boston Globe tweeted on Monday “great investigative work by high school journalists,” with a link to their story. In an interview with the Collegio, the Globe’s investigative journalist said “I can’t imagine having done this type of story in high school. I didn’t do my first investigative story until I was in journalism school, and it was difficult then.” Wallack went on to commend the Pittsburg High students.

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“I thought it was remarkable… it was very methodical, they had to invest a lot of effort into checking out each and every one of the principal’s educational claims. They had to challenge her statements and do fact checking. They published a story that was very critical of the incoming principal of their school and challenged authority. It would be a good scoop any professional journalist would like to have,” Wallack said.

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         Students at the school newspaper began to question the validity of Robertson’s resume after a search of her name turned up stories of her time in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Robertson had spent the last 17 years in and out of Dubai as an educator and CEO of Atticus I S Consultants LLC where she claimed to have garnered experience in curriculum and the equivalent of an administrator at an English school. Based on reports by Gulf News, Robertson was a part of a failing school called Dubai American Scientific School that was shut down due to “major health and safety issues, discrepancies in student attendance and illegal hiring of teachers.” It is unclear how much of this took place during Robertson’s time at the school, but government education authority in Dubai confirmed she was “unauthorized” to hold her position at the school.

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         “I found this article that she violated the regulations at her school in Dubai and so that sparked us to find more information about her,” said junior Booster staffer Maddie Baden, who was planning on just doing a story to introduce her new principal.

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         The real hiccup with Baden and her peers was her listed degree from Corllins University, a private school based out of Stockton, California.

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 “We focused, or my kids, on her education because that is what they decided had the most irrefutable proof… they spent two to three weeks looking into all of this… and there were some things that do not add up,” said their newspaper advisor Emily Smith.

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Corllins University has been under fire for being a diploma mill, or place that offers degrees in exchange for a sum of money. After trying to contact Corllins, their phone numbers do not connect and they did not return any emails. The Better Business Bureau says that “the true physical address for Corllins is unknown,” and the state of California could not verify that a Corllins ever existed in the state. It is not an accredited university and is not listed with thousands of others schools with the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Robertson also claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Tulsa University, a degree that has never been offered in that school’s history.

Questions were then raised on how Amy Robertson was handed a $93,000 per year job with no more proof than a high school diploma.

Superintendent of schools Destry Brown originally refuted the claims in the Booster story, and the Pittsburg Morning Sun said that Brown remained confident she is the most qualified candidate three days before accepting her resignation.

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“It made the school board and superintendent look like they were sold on a candidate regardless of a lot of the facts in the case,” said Pittsburg High School journalism parent Brad Bourbina.

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Brown explained that her contract was dependent upon her obtaining a license in the State of Kansas and receiving her official transcripts, which did not come.

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“We were not able to prove or disprove any of that information and neither was the state of Kansas,” Brown said.

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After the resignation was accepted Tuesday night, Brown still maintained that some of the facts the Booster presented were inaccurate, and mentioned the school board knew of some of the things they reported already and would have come to the same conclusion eventually. Brown said he is interested in altering the hiring process.

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“I’ve checked with other districts and we do it the same way everyone else does, but we’re probably going to make a change in our process,” Brown said.

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Administrations have been juked into hiring frauds before. In the 1990’s, a Terrence P. Carter was accepted as the superintendent of schools in New London, but that decision was reversed after the discovery his doctorate from “Lexington University” was a diploma mill produced fake.

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Matthew Kaufmann of the Hartford Courant reports that during the same time period, records obtained by the General Accounting Office in D.C. identified 463 federal employees who had pursued degrees from diploma mills, including 28 senior-level employees working at such agencies as the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.

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“I appreciate that our kids ask questions and don’t just accept something because somebody told them, and that would have been the easy thing to do,” Brown said. “They caused us to continue to ask questions.”

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The school board released a statement in a special meeting announcing Robertson’s resignation. “In light of the issues that arose, Dr. Robertson felt it was in the best interest of the district to resign her position.”

The meeting quickly adjourned, and parent Brad Bourbina spoke up, surprised the school board had nothing to say to the 6 journalists in the room that broke the case to the public. 

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“It would be nice to see the school board actually acknowledge the work that the journalism students put in, to not do that would be to ignore the elephant in the room which is your journalism staff at the Pittsburg high school potentially saved the school from a disastrous hire,” Bourbina said.

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After Bourbina interrupted the end of the meeting, Brown told the students in the room that he would visit them in class the next day to personally thank them.

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The students who wrote the story sat down with the Collegio, explaining what the resignation and outcome meant.

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“It was kind of rewarding because it shows that they actually listened to us… and to have that happen at this level made everything come together and made me feel good about it,” Baden said.

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"Personally, a lot of times I kind of wanted to quit because no one would want to listen and they’re all just going to be mad at us,” said Kali Poetsnikse. “We are very involved and we didn’t want anything to get in the way of us and our relationship with our new principal, so it was kind of difficult going with this but we knew if no one else is going to write about it we wanted to.”

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Joplin Globe’s Andra Stefanoni and Kansas Scholastic Press Association’s Director Eric Thomas helped advise the students on their story after their advisor recused herself.

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“This is something that is unprecedented, that they found and broke news that was this controversial and was overwhelmingly correct and had such an effect,” Thomas said.

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“Eric was a major player in allowing our story to come to fruition and his advice and guidance throughout the process really reassured us to do what we knew was the right thing to do,” said Gina Mathew of the Booster staff.

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“In many places this story would be censored and never come out,” Thomas said.

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The state of Kansas has a unique student publications act that protects the flow of information out of high school publications.

“It is to the state’s credit that students were able to publish the story. You can certainly imagine in many other school districts the temptation will be for teachers or administrators to stop publication of the story,” said Wallack.

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Superintendent Brown was asked if he would change the way the publication was handled in the district from here on out.

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“They’re entitled to an opinion and they can write the stories, I won’t ever do that,” Brown said, a heavy first amendment supporter.

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 “It just reinforced the idea that journalism matters, and I would continue to be active in community decisions and decisions that affect me even outside of school,” Mathew said.

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“The great thing is those students matched those very serious allegations with very serious reporting and backed them up,” Wallack said.

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Pittsburg High School reopened the search for a new principal this week.