Jessica Bakeman
Education reporterJessica Bakeman is an investigative reporter and editor focusing on K-12 and higher education for WLRN, South Florida's NPR member station. Bakeman was awarded the 2020 Journalist of the Year award from the Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Bakeman is the editor and project manager of Class of COVID-19: An Education Crisis for Florida's Vulnerable Students, a comprehensive multimedia series from Florida Public Media examining how the pandemic upended public education statewide. Published in spring 2021 with support from a competitive Education Writers Association fellowship, Class of COVID-19 includes a radio documentary, an hourlong television special and a limited-run newsletter.
Bakeman also reported and produced WLRN's 2019 audio documentary and investigative series, Chartered: Florida's First Private Takeover Of A Public School System, which earned a regional Edward R. Murrow Award for news documentary and an honorable mention for the inaugural Esserman-Knight Journalism Prize.
Bakeman won national first-place awards for audio storytelling in 2019 and education beat reporting in 2018 from the Education Writers Association. Other honors include a Salute to Excellence award from the National Association of Black Journalists and a Journalism Award of Excellence from the American College of Emergency Physicians, both for work in 2018.
Previously, Bakeman helped establish POLITICO's national network of state capital coverage, serving as an original member of the company's bureaus in both Albany, N.Y., and Tallahassee, Fla. She also covered New York state politics for The Wall Street Journal and USA Today.
Bakeman is the past president of the Capitol Press Club of Florida, a nonprofit organization that raises money for college scholarships benefiting journalism students. Also, she twice chaired a planning committee for the New York State Legislative Correspondents Association's annual political satire show, the oldest of its kind in the country.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism and English literature from SUNY Plattsburgh, a public liberal arts college in northeastern New York. She proudly hails from Rochester, N.Y.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a controversial bill into law that will significantly change the voting process in Florida. He also did it at an exclusive West Palm Beach event with supporters, that was only broadcast on Fox News — raising legal questions and outcry over a lack of transparency. -
The Broward County School Board hopes to meet next Thursday to finalize the separation agreements and begin discussions about appointing an interim superintendent.
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The Broward County school board will begin hashing out the details of Superintendent Robert Runcie's exit during a meeting Thursday, following his announcement earlier this week that he would be willing to "step aside" from his position.
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Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie offers to leave more than three years after leading the district through the nation's deadliest high school shooting.
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Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie and General Counsel Barbara Myrick were arrested Wednesday by Florida’s top law enforcement agency.
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Some faculty at the University of Miami responded to last summer's reckoning over racial injustice by proposing a new program in Native American and Global Indigenous Studies. Native Americans are a tiny minority on the Coral Gables campus and one Cherokee graduate student is on her own journey to educate her peers.
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When lawmakers have slashed Florida's Bright Futures scholarship during past difficult budget cycles, Black and Latino students lost out the most.
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COVID-19 has starkly exposed the socioeconomic and racial fault lines at Morningside K-8 Academy, a dual-language magnet school in a gentrifying neighborhood.
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The systemic draining of local control is about politics — and it's about money.
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The state government pushed local school districts to reopen classrooms last fall sooner than elected school board members thought was safe. Some see it as the state standing up for parent choice, while others interpreted it as the state undermining local decision-making.
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More than a million public school students in Florida are going to school through a screen. That may cost them and the U.S. economy in the decades to come.
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During this special Class of COVID-19 edition of The Sunshine Economy, superintendents of South Florida school districts detail how they're trying to find thousands of students who aren't going to school — and what the consequences will be if they don't.
