Jessica Bakeman
Director of Enterprise JournalismJessica Bakeman is Director of Enterprise Journalism at WLRN, South Florida's NPR member station. Bakeman oversees the station's new investigations team, and she co-edited the 2023 investigation Unguarded, examining the Guardianship Program of Dade County's real estate sales practices. Since joining WLRN in fall 2017, Bakeman has also served as senior news editor and education reporter.
Bakeman was the editor and project manager of Class of COVID-19: An Education Crisis for Florida's Vulnerable Students, a 2021 multimedia series from Florida Public Media exploring how the pandemic upended public education statewide. The project won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for excellence in digital.
In 2020, she was named journalist of the year by the Florida chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Bakeman 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 Murrow for news documentary and an honorable mention for the inaugural Esserman-Knight Journalism Prize.
She won national first-place awards for audio storytelling in 2019 and education beat reporting in 2018 from the Education Writers Association.
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 a 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.
She can be reached at jbakeman@wlrnnews.org
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A local student is a finalist in an international braille literacy competition. The Braille Challenge encourages blind and visually impaired kids to go to college, develop job skills and socialize. -
The statewide chapter of No Kid Hungry, a national organization tackling childhood food insecurity, has seen more requests for grants to support transporting food directly to students and families. -
The aftermath of Parkland. How to manage COVID-19. Escalating racial tensions. These are just some of the challenges Donald Fennoy has faced in his time leading the Palm Beach County school district. WLRN spoke with Palm Beach Post reporter Andrew Marra about the superintendent's tenure. -
In South Florida, the Palm Beach County school district reported the highest percentage of students taking in-person classes and saw no decline in third graders' pass rates on state language arts tests. -
A new report from a statewide organization of education foundations cites some ideas pioneered by South Florida school districts. -
Florida International University and Broward College plan to use the unrestricted funding to boost programs for needy students. -
Education policy making has always been nonpartisan in intention but, in reality, it's getting more political. -
Samya Zia, 19, an economics major at Florida International University, won $9,000 in a national startup competition earlier this year. -
A divided school board voted after hearing from a divided public. -
WLRN asked middle and high schoolers to share messages to their future selves about what it was like to take classes during COVID-19. We talked to them about some of their responses during a live virtual field trip to the South Florida Fair. -
A grant program designed to dismantle anti-Black racism has led to a new initiative: Native American studies. -
Despite opposition from some school board members, Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie will stay on for 90 days to advise in the soon-to-be-selected interim leader's transition.
