Natalie La Roche Pietri
Education ReporterNatalie La Roche Pietri is the education reporter at WLRN.
Before joining WLRN, Natalie interned at the Boston Globe on the Great Divide, a team dedicated to investigating race, class, and inequality in Boston-area schools.
She covered general news as an intern at the Miami Herald, and reported on camera covering politics in Washington, D.C, as an NBCU Academy Diversity, Equity and Inclusion fellow.
Natalie graduated from Florida International University with a double major in digital communications and English. She was the managing editor for Caplin News, a student media digital publication at FIU, and president of the Society of Professional Journalists at FIU.
Originally from Venezuela, Natalie grew up in Broward and speaks fluent Spanish. You can reach her at nlarochep@wlrnnews.org and follow her on X at @natalaroche.
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"For some students that are sort of just barely hitting the qualifying threshold, this could have significant impact on their future planning," said Bethany Lacey, chief executive officer of Take Stock in Children. -
Enrollment dropped by 5.6%, a larger decline than the 5% drop recorded on last year’s benchmark enrollment day. The seats lost become part of the more than 60,000 empty seats in the district. -
The cohort of five fellows include former U.K Prime Minister Liz Truss and Dominik Tarczyński, a right-wing Polish politician and member of the European Parliament. -
The Broward County School Board is expected to give the superintendent the green light to begin the process to rename Sawgrass Middle School in the late vice mayor's honor. -
How do you teach a generation of students to never forget the attacks when they have nothing to remember? For a Palm Beach County teacher, it's teaching the human story of the history that's important. -
Miami-Dade County School Board adopts $7.4 billion budget and warns of 'difficult decisions' to comeOperating under a precarious financial state, the district is moving forward with a plan that may need adjusting as the school year advances. -
As it tries to bear the brunt of a financial storm, the Broward County School Board approved its budget for the 2026-27 school year — but without a guaranteed salary increase teachers had been desperate for. A teachers union leader said board members were “ weak and uneducated." -
" To me, this is not a job — it's a calling. A calling to build upon all that we have accomplished together and to lead Miami-Dade County Public Schools into the next chapter," Rafael Villalobos told a crowd of 300 people at his installation ceremony. -
The district is hosting a handful of community meetings to hear from residents about what they think of the plans for their neighborhood schools' futures. -
Miami-Dade County Schools' new chief Rafael Villalobos kicked off his tenure by pausing the controversial process examining potential closures and consolidations for more than two dozen schools. “There's a lot of misinformation out there and we want to make sure that we clear up all of that misinformation and it starts with us," he told a school board committee meeting Wednesday as he announced the surprise move. -
The bulk of the decline was in district-run K-12 schools, but charter schools also saw a decrease of nearly 1,000 students. -
A document released Tuesday by the Attendance Boundary Committee named 12 schools that are being “reassessed” and 15 that are “under review.”
