National Trust newsrooms buck national trend with impactful investments in education reporting
A recent national study counted how many local reporters are still working in American communities and what they cover. Among its troubling conclusions: Local coverage of education has dwindled to close to nothing.
The 2026 Local Journalist Index, from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News, reviewed 4.2 million articles published in the first three months of the year. Nearly 77% of U.S. counties produced zero education articles mentioning a local community during that stretch.
The missing coverage isn't a sign that families stopped caring. In a 2024 national survey the study cites, 95% of parents called education reporting important, but only 68% were satisfied with what they could get. This indicates that people want this coverage, even though it’s not being produced in most of the country.
The study also names which decisions go uncovered when a district loses its reporter. School closures, boundary changes, consolidations, enrollment policy. Decisions that reshape a family's year and are, in the study's words, largely invisible without a reporter whose job it is to show up.
The newsrooms operated by the National Trust for Local News provide exactly the education reporting the index found missing almost everywhere else.
Georgia: a decade of red ink, hidden in plain sight
In Dublin, Georgia, a city of about 16,000 in the middle of the state, Courier Herald reporter Rodney Manley spent the past year documenting the collapse of the Dublin City School District's finances. The Courier Herald is one of 21 newspapers operated by the Georgia Trust for Local News, a subsidiary of the National Trust.
District leaders had said they were in good shape. They claimed a $5 million surplus on a budget of roughly $47 million. Manley's reporting told a different story. The district hadn't paid $6 million it owed the state health insurance program, and it hadn't completed an audit since 2021.
Manley found there was no surplus. The district had run a deficit for a decade, one year as high as $7 million, during the same period it announced it had climbed out of the hole. Later reporting put the shortfall as high as $13 million.
Two days after Manley's first story in The Courier Herald, the district's finance director resigned. After he reported that the district had given the superintendent a large raise while operating in the red, the superintendent took early retirement. At one point, Manley's sources were passing him state correspondence before school board members had seen the same letters.
Nobody was going to announce that the surplus wasn't real. It took a reporter who had read enough of the district's financial statements to know what was missing from them.
Maine: 650 ballots, and the question nobody had asked
Voters in Portland started receiving absentee ballots for a school budget the City Council wouldn't vote on for another week. Riley Board, the Press Herald's education reporter, who had spent two years reporting on how Maine pays for its schools, asked whether state law allowed early voting on an unfinished budget. The Press Herald is the largest of 11 publications operated by the Maine Trust for Local News, another state subsidiary of the National Trust.
Maine law states that absentee ballots returned before the final budget meeting must be marked rejected. Board asked the clerks who administer absentee voting how they applied that rule, and got different answers. Portland's city clerk said the statute didn't reference a City Council vote at all. The Maine Department of Education and the Maine Municipal Association both said it did.
One town stamped its envelopes with a warning date, and another tucked a yellow instruction sheet into each one, telling voters their ballots wouldn't count if they returned them early. Another city clerk said she doesn’t open envelopes until the day after the council meets because she doesn't want to reject anyone's vote.
After Board's story ran, a Portland city spokesperson said the Press Herald's questions had prompted the city to review its compliance with Maine law. Portland then rejected about 650 absentee ballots that voters had already returned and mailed replacements. The city had included a notice with ballots in past years warning voters to wait. This year it left the notice out.
The city wasn't aware a problem existed. Its clerk read the statute one way, the state read it another, and no one had put the two readings side by side. It took a reporter calling clerks in four towns to show that the practice didn't match the law.
Colorado: a $33 million promise no one was checking
In Jefferson County, Colorado's second-largest school district, reporter Suzie Glassman spent this year following the money behind a promise the district made to voters and then stopped tracking. Glassman’s reporting appears in the seven newspapers owned by the Colorado Trust for Local News and is shared with other publications in Metro Denver. She is also author of the Colorado Trust’s Class Notes newsletter, which brings readers behind the scenes of her reporting and regularly breaks news about Jeffco schools.
In 2018, Jeffco voters approved a ballot measure, known as 5A, that has raised more than $33 million a year for teacher pay, mental health services and classroom technology. The measure named a Citizens' Financial Oversight Advisory Committee to review the spending for transparency and accountability. Glassman found that the committee was never created.
The district leaned instead on a pre-existing Financial Oversight Committee, which took up 5A between food service deficits and bond projects, issued a single paragraph of conclusions in October 2020, then went five years and more than 55 meetings without formally discussing the tracking of how that money was being spent.
The district said it had "lost track" of the promise, citing the pandemic and staff turnover, but continued to claim the Financial Oversight Committee had reviewed the levy funds in detail from 2021 onward. The meeting minutes didn’t support the claim.
Over eight years, the measure collected more than a quarter-billion dollars in property taxes with no independent review of where it went.
One month after the first story, and amid pressure from the county's teachers unions, then Superintendent Tracy Dorland told the board the district would finally convene the oversight committee in April, eight years late. It would be a "look back" at money already spent and positions already cut. Accountability after the fact, but accountability that didn't exist until someone asked where the money went.
The exception, not the rule
The Local Journalist Index isn't a story about what journalism used to be. It's a measurement of what most communities no longer have.
As old models for local news wither away, the education beat is one of many that have vanished. The National Trust for Local News has ensured this coverage is alive and enterprising in the newsrooms it operates.
This year’s reporting from Dublin, Portland and Jefferson County shows the impact of that commitment.
