Days after student reporters at Pittsburg High School in Kansas dug into the background of their newly hired principal and found questionable credentials, she resigned from the $93,000-a-year job. 
 
 “She was going to be the head of our school, and we wanted be assured that she was qualified and had the proper credentials,” said Trina Paul, a senior and an editor of the Booster Redux, the school newspaper. “We stumbled on some things that most might not consider legitimate credentials.” 
 
 Minutes into a closed special meeting Tuesday night of the Pittsburg Community Schools Board of Education, board president Al Mendez emerged to announce to a packed boardroom that Amy Robertson, the new principal, had resigned. 
 
 “In light of the issues that arose, Amy Robertson felt it was in the best interest of the district to resign her position,” Superintendent Destry Brown said in a statement after the executive session. 
 
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 The board agreed with that decision and said will reopen the principal position Wednesday morning and contact others who had applied for the job to see if they are still interested. 
 
 “Our goal is to find the best person to be our principal that we can find,” Brown said. “I know the students want that too.” 
 
 Pittsburg journalism adviser Emily Smith said she is “very proud” of her students. “They were not out to get anyone to resign or to get anyone fired. They worked very hard to uncover the truth.” 
 
 Students journalists published a story Friday questioning the legitimacy of the private college — Corllins University — where Robertson got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago. U.S. Department of Education officials, contacted by The Star, confirmed student reports; the federal agency could not find evidence of Corllins in operation. The school wasn’t included among the agency’s list of schools closed since 1986. Robertson earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Tulsa. 
 
 Students found and The Star confirmed the existence of several articles referring to Corllins as a diploma mill — where people can buy a degree, diploma or certificates. And searches on the school’s website go nowhere. No one from the university responded to emails sent by The Star this week. 
 
 Contacted by email Friday, Robertson, who has lived off and on for 19 years in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, said, “The current status of Corllins University is not relevant because when I received my MA in 1994 and my PhD in 2010, there was no issue.” 
 
 She also said, “All three of my degrees have been authenticated by the US government.” Robertson declined to comment directly on students’ questions about her credentials, saying, “I have no comment in response to the questions posed by PHS students regarding my credentials because their concerns are not based on facts.” 
 
 The Pittsburg Board of Education approved hiring Robertson at its meeting March 6. 
 
 In a news release about the hiring, district spokesman Zach Fletcher said that “Robertson comes to Pittsburg with decades of experience in education.” 
 
 Robertson is CEO of Atticus I S Consultants, “an education consulting firm where she gained leadership and management experience at the international equivalence of a building administrator and superintendent,” the release said. 
 
 Robertson, after application reviews and interviews with administrators, faculty and students, “emerged as the best fit” for the job, said Brown. He said the district relies on the Kansas Department of Education to approve a candidate’s credentials. 
 
 “I felt like she is very knowledgeable about what is going on in education today in college and career readiness, she is very familiar with Common Core, she knows about how a building works and about maintaining a safe environment,” he said. 
 
 He was surprised students questioned Robertson’s credentials. 
 
 “The kids had never gone through someone like this before,” Brown said. But he said he encouraged them to seek answers. “I want our kids to have real-life experiences, whether it’s welding or journalism.” 
 
 Despite questions, Brown said Friday that the district’s school board had “100 percent supported the Robertson hire.” 
 
 Tuesday night he said he felt bad about how it all turned out. “ I do feel it is my responsibility. As superintendent I feel like I let the teachers and the students down. I publicly admit that.” 
 
 Robertson, who he said also has a teaching degree from the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, isn’t licensed in Kansas. She would have had to take classes at Pittsburg State University, pass a test and acquire her license before she could officially hold the principal post. That isn’t uncommon for someone hired from outside the state, Brown said. 
 
 Maddie Baden, a 17-year-old Pittsburg High junior, said the student news staff began looking into Robertson’s background after an electronic search of her name turned up several articles published by Gulf News about an English language school connected to Robertson in Dubai. 
 
 The 2012 articles said Dubai’s education authority had suspended the license for Dubai American Scientific School and accused Robertson of not being authorized to serve as principal of that school. The private, for-profit school received an “unsatisfactory” rating on Dubai education authority inspection reports every year from 2008 to 2012 and was closed in September 2013. 
 
 “That raised a red flag,” Baden said. “If students could uncover all of this, I want to know why the adults couldn’t find this..” 
 
 She had originally interviewed Robertson for a routine school newspaper story “to introduce the new principal to the community,” Baden said. “No one knew who she was.” 
 
 Pittsburg is about 90 minutes south of Kansas City on U.S. 69. The high school has 900 students. 
 
 Six students worked about three weeks looking into Robertson’s past work and education. 
 
 When they went to Corllins University’s website, “We found a website that didn’t work,” Baden said. And a student checking with the Council for Higher Education Accreditation found that Corllins was not listed in its database of 7,600 schools accredited by a recognized accrediting agency in the United States. 
 
 But officials there told The Star the school could have been accredited in the past. ||||| High school journalists in Kansas investigated their principal and found discrepancies in her credentials, prompting her to resign. Professional journalists like The Post's David Fahrenthold congratulated the kids for asking tough questions. (Monica Akhtar,Victoria Walker/The Washington Post) 
 
 Connor Balthazor, 17, was in the middle of study hall when he was called into a meeting with his high school newspaper adviser. 
 
 A group of reporters and editors from the student newspaper, the Booster Redux at Pittsburg High School in southeastern Kansas, had gathered to talk about Amy Robertson, who was hired as the high school’s head principal on March 6. 
 
 The student journalists had begun researching Robertson, and quickly found some discrepancies in her education credentials. For one, when they researched Corllins University, the private university where Robertson said she got her master’s and doctorate degrees years ago, the website didn’t work. They found no evidence that it was an accredited university. 
 
 “There were some things that just didn’t quite add up,” Balthazor told The Washington Post. 
 
 The students began digging into a weeks-long investigation that would result in an article published Friday questioning the legitimacy of the principal’s degrees and of her work as an education consultant. 
 
 On Tuesday night, Robertson resigned. 
 
 “In light of the issues that arose, Dr. Robertson felt it was in the best interest of the district to resign her position,” Pittsburg Community Schools announced in a statement. “The Board has agreed to accept her resignation.” 
 
 The resignation thrust the student newspaper staff into local, state and national news, with professional journalists nationwide applauding the students for asking tough questions and prompting change in their administration. 
 
 “Everybody kept telling them, ‘stop poking your nose where it doesn’t belong,'” newspaper adviser Emily Smith told The Post. But with the encouragement of the superintendent, the students persisted. 
 
 “They were at a loss that something that was so easy for them to see was waiting to be noticed by adults,” Smith said. 
 
 In the Booster Redux article, a team of six students — five juniors and one senior — revealed that Corllins had been portrayed in a number of articles as a diploma mill, a place where people can buy a degree, diploma or certificates. Corllins is not accredited by the U.S. Department of Education, the students reported. The Better Business Bureau’s website says Corllins’s physical address is unknown and the school isn’t a BBB-accredited institution. 
 
 “All of this was completely overlooked,” Balthazor said. “All of the shining reviews did not have these crucial pieces of information … you would expect your authority figures to find this.” 
 
 Robertson had been living in Dubai for more than 20 years before she was hired for the position. She said she most recently worked as the chief executive of an education consulting firm known as Atticus I S Consultants there. 
 
 In a conference call with the student journalists, Robertson “presented incomplete answers, conflicting dates and inconsistencies in her responses,” the students reported. She said she attended Corllins before it lost accreditation, the Booster Redux reported. 
 
 When contacted by the Kansas City Star after the publication of the students’ article, Robertson said all three of her degrees “have been authenticated by the U.S. government.” She declined to comment directly on students’ questions about her credentials, “because their concerns are not based on facts,” she said. 
 
 In an emergency faculty meeting Tuesday, the superintendent said Robertson was unable to produce a transcript confirming her undergraduate degree from the University of Tulsa, Smith said. 
 
 During the course of their reporting, the students spent weeks reaching out to educational institutions and accreditation agencies to corroborate Robertson’s background, some even working through spring break. Their adviser, Smith, had to recuse herself from the story because she was on the committee that hired Robertson. So the students sought the help of Eric Thomas, executive director of the Kansas Scholastic Press Association, and other local and national journalists and experts. 
 
 Under Kansas law, high school journalists are protected from administrative censorship. “The kids are treated as professionals,” Smith said. But with that freedom came a major responsibility to get the story right, Smith said. It also meant overcoming a natural hesitancy many students have to question authority. 
 
 “At the very beginning it was a little bit exciting,” Balthazor said. “It was like in the movies, a big city journalist chasing down a lead.” 
 
 But as the students began delving deeper into the story, keeping notes on a whiteboard, “it really started hitting me that this is a much bigger deal,” Balthazor said. 
 
 The students were among those packed into a school boardroom Tuesday night when the school board president announced Robertson’s resignation. After the announcement, a parent in the audience stood up and asked school officials if they would be recognizing the student journalists for uncovering crucial details about Robertson’s background. The superintendent said he would be meeting with the students Wednesday to personally thank them. 
 
 “We’d broken out of our comfort zones so much,” Balthazor said. “To know that the administration saw that and respected that, it was a really great moment for us.” 
 
 After local news broke that Robertson had resigned, numerous national journalists — including The Post’s David Fahrenthold — tweeted the students’ story, congratulating them for their work. 
 
 “Holy crap,” Balthazor thought, “why are these people paying attention to this little journalism story from southeast Kansas?” 
 
 While the high school junior was leaving track practice Tuesday night, he learned in a group message with his newspaper staff that Todd Wallack, a reporter for the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team, had tweeted the students’ story, saying: “Great investigative work by high school journalists.” Balthazor sat in his car in the parking lot and immediately called his mom to tell her the news. 
 
 “I honestly thought they were joking at first,” Balthazor said. The Booster Redux staff had watched the movie “Spotlight” in class last year, Balthazor said. “It was awesome to know that such respected members of the journalism community had our backs.” 
 
 After graduation, Balthazor said, he hopes to pursue a degree in creative writing or filmmaking. Even though he doesn’t necessarily plan to stick with journalism, Balthazor said the past few weeks had been “surreal.” 
 
 “Most high schoolers would never get even close to an opportunity to get to experience something like this,” he said. 
 
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 America is ‘over-stored’ and Payless ShoeSource is the latest victim ||||| I have two master's degrees, five years' experience in the nonprofit sector and three years' experience teaching -- and I cannot get a job. Why? Just google me. I'm the "Hooker Teacher" -- at least that's what I've come to be called ever since Sept. 27, 2010, when I found myself on the cover of the New York Post . 
 
 "Meet Melissa Petro," the story began," the teacher who gives a new twist to sex ed." The piece describes me as a "tattooed former hooker and stripper" who was "shockingly upfront about her past." Indeed, earlier that month, I'd written an Op-Ed on the Huffington Post that criticized the recent censoring of the adult services section of Craigslist and came clean about my own sex-worker past. Because I was arguing that sex workers shouldn't be ashamed to speak for themselves, I signed my name to it. The New York Post wasn't interested in my politics, however; its interest seemed only in cooking up shock that an elementary school teacher would dare admit such a shady history. 
 
 The Internet shaming was fast, intense and seemingly unending, summed up in February by columnist Andrea Peyser, who wrote: "Hooker turned teacher Melissa Petro is a disgrace." 
 
 Eight months after the story broke, I am jobless. I cannot get hired. And even my biggest supporters ask me privately: "But seriously, what were you thinking?" The answer is complicated. I was being idealistic. I was being provocative. I was naive. I picked a fight that I thought I could win -- and I was wrong. 
 
 One reason I was so casual about the disclosure was that I had been writing about my past long before becoming a teacher. As a student at the New School, where I earned a degree in creative nonfiction, I began work on a memoir that details, in part, how I began stripping while living in Mexico as a student abroad. As an undergraduate at Antioch, I conducted ethnographic research across Europe and in the U.S., interviewing women from all aspects of the industry about their lives and their professions (published in the collection "Sex Work Matters: Power and Intimacy in the Sex Industry"). The subject of sex work and workers' rights became a passion about which I've written in print and online, everywhere from academic and literary journals to political blogs. 
 
 Another reason I didn't think my story would be shocking is because, well, my story isn't shocking. Whereas some women's road to sex work entails coercion and last-ditch survival, for me, this wasn't the case. The product of a working-class home -- the first in her family to go to college, let alone study abroad -- my working as a stripper began as a means to an end. Prior to stripping, I'd worked in fast food. I'd worked in retail. I even spent one summer delivering singing telegrams. I was used to long hours, unreasonable bosses and very little pay; stripping -- at least at first -- was the ideal job. 
 
 But sex work, I would learn, was a far from perfect occupation. Prostitution, in particular, was not the job for me. I was simply not suited for a profession that relied on dishonesty. I got caught up in the industry's pull toward materialism and greed. The industry's criminalized and stigmatized nature only exacerbated the rigors of the work. I kept my job a secret, even from my family and friends. Living a lie, I lied to myself. My own denial and self-justification made it near impossible to extricate myself from the business. It was only by writing about my experiences that I was able to see my truth. 
 
 Around my 27th birthday, I gave up sex work for good. It was some months later when -- unemployed and working on a book -- teaching presented itself as an option. I was attracted to the flexibility and creativity of the profession. I liked the idea of working with children and of making a difference in my community, not to mention the summer vacation. After graduating from the New School, I landed a spot as a New York City Teaching Fellow, which bills itself as a highly competitive program that recruits "high quality, dedicated individuals from different backgrounds" to become teachers in New York City's struggling public schools. My first year as a teacher, I earned my master's in childhood education in the evenings while working full-time at an elementary school in the South Bronx. I taught art and creative writing to students in grades K-5, nearly 700 students each week. In the three years I spent there, I grew to love my job. 
 
 My past had no bearing on my competence as a teacher, and so I refused to operate as if it did. The idea that an elementary school teacher wasn't entitled to a life in her off-hours I found equally absurd. Sure, I'd seen other teachers get in trouble for stupid things like pictures or comments posted on Facebook. Even so, I did not think it would happen to me. I was well appreciated at my school. When it came to my administration and my colleagues, my personal life was just that: personal. Many of them knew I was a writer, and those who had bothered to google me knew I wrote about my past. It had never been an issue -- until the day it became front-page news. 
 
 There it was, my name and likeness -- a most unflattering shot, by the way -- under varying versions of the "hooker teacher" headline (which always made it sound like I was still involved in sex work, as though I were heading from the reading circle straight to working the streets): "Bronx art teacher blabs about exploits as stripper and hooker," "Prostitute teacher a reason to end tenure." I was called an "idiot prosti-teacher" in one N.Y. Post headline. One photo caption by the same publication read, "Attention whore." More offensive than my past, it seemed, was the fact I'd had the gall to talk about it. The women's blog, the Frisky, supposed it was "all part of Petro's media-savvy plan to get publicity for her upcoming memoir," which the writer called "disgusting." The Daily News, Inside Edition and Us Weekly all sent their female reporters, women ironically similar to me -- young professionals, well-dressed, writers themselves -- to get in my face, demanding to know how I could refer to myself as a feminist. 
 
 As an advocate, I had long ago realized the media generally treats current and former sex workers in one of two ways: We are portrayed as victims, looked down upon and felt sorry for, too stupid to realize our own victimization; or else we are made out to be villains -- dirty, cheap and willing to do anything to satisfy our greed. For years, I'd fought these gross stereotypes. Now I found myself on the receiving end of it. 
 
 To some, it was unfathomable to think that a woman could have once been a prostitute and, at another time, served her community competently as a teacher. Even New York's Mayor Bloomberg made a statement personally requesting my permanent removal from the classroom. It was as though I were a monster needing to be stopped. 
 
 I'm not a monster, or a moron. I'm a human being, and -- like everyone else -- I've made mistakes. In the community where I grew up, girls didn't become writers and teachers; they became strippers. I worked hard to earn my degrees. Of my sex work past, I have no regrets. Why, hadn't I done exactly what critics of prostitution would have wanted? I had exited the sex industry to become a "productive" member of society. And yet no one seemed to accept that I might not be ashamed of my past. That I might, on the contrary, be proud of it. 
 
 I thought my perspective deserved to be heard. I thought that my speech was protected. I did not believe a government employee could lose her job for publishing an Op-Ed. Like I said, I was naive. 
 
 The night before the Post article came out I received a phone call from the superintendent of schools in my district informing me that I'd been put in reassignment. Instead of teaching I would report to the Department of Education administrative offices and sit awaiting instruction, where I sat for months until this past Friday, my last day. After months of investigation, I was formally charged. The charges -- conduct unbecoming a professional --were a direct result of my published writing, the evidence cited against me consisting entirely of my quoted work. The fact that I was competent in my role as a teacher was never called into question. Even the Post could find no way of describing me other than "well liked." But my job performance was never a consideration. The only fact that seemed to matter, apparently, was that I'd been a whore. 
 
 In the days and weeks following my reassignment, I learned a number of hard lessons about constitutional law. The constitutionality of a government employee's speech is contingent on whether or not that speech creates a distraction in the workplace and, if it does, it is not protected so long as the distraction outweighs its political worth. This is the same reason that a soldier, according to people like John McCain, shouldn't announce that he or she is gay. Doing so, the argument goes, would create a "mortal distraction." In the case of the Hooker Teacher, in order to fire me the DOE needed only to prove that my writing created a disruption in my school community and that such a disruption had little societal value. Whether it was my speech or the speech of the New York Post that created the disruption was, of course, an argument to be made. 
 
 Meanwhile, the actual political import of my work was impossible to gauge, my own words buried in google searches underneath inflammatory news pieces, sensational headlines and cherry-picked excerpts from my creative work that, printed out of context, suggested I wrote at length about marijuana-fueled shenanigans and lesbian love affairs. Contrary to how I was being painted in the headlines, I was not a teacher blogging recklessly in her off-hours on WordPress about her sexual escapades. I was a writer and, as a writer, I was establishing a platform as a social commentator on an issue of cultural importance. 
 
 In the wake of Hooker Teacher headlines no one was debating the censoring of Craigslist, the legality of prostitution or even the constitutionality of my reassignment. The heated debate in the commentary section of the Daily News, for example, was whether I was hot enough to be paid for sex. The papers printed my personal Facebook statuses as if they were news. CBS published a slide show of my personal pictures, implicating my family and friends. The home where I lived was revealed on the nightly news so that anyone who wanted to could easily come find me. I was personally insulted and put at risk, then made to feel that by publishing a work of serious nonfiction, I had been "asking for it." 
 
 Sure, I knew I was taking a risk. I stated that in the original HuffPo piece. But knowing there is a risk doesn't mean you realize how great a risk it is, or what the consequences will be. And the consequences, in a word, have been devastating. 
 
 While I was paid by my employer through April, I had been relying on two after-school jobs to make ends meet. The day the Post story hit I was unceremoniously fired from both, including a position working in the childcare section of my gym. Other than an offer to be in a porn mag and another paid opportunity to be interviewed on "Inside Edition" -- an agreement that felt a little like Red Riding Hood signing off to have dinner with the wolves -- there were no silver linings in my dark cloud of publicity. Like the teenager I had once been, this past winter I would've done almost anything for cash. No one willing to hire the hooker teacher meant that I skipped meals. I walked instead of taking the train and didn't launder my clothes as often as necessary. This, I understand, is the predicament of the unemployed and working poor and it reminded me a lot of how I grew up. I worked hard to escape those circumstances, and the fact that I was back there -- with student loans to boot -- felt unfair. 
 
 I suppose I could've just gone back to hooking. Instead, I made the arguably anti-feminist decision to give up my apartment and move in with my boyfriend. If this situation has taught me anything, it is that sometimes we must put ideals aside and think practically -- much like I did at 19 years old, when I became a stripper. So, in the end, I resigned from my job, rather than pursuing a trial. I quit rather than be fired because, had I not signed their agreement, the DOE threatened to contest my unemployment. As much as I believed in the merits of my case, it was a risk I couldn't take. 
 
 Now, I send out rafts of résumés, and I can't find work. Whether that's partly the economy, I can't say, but these days it seems my most important former occupation is the one not on my résumé. Despite all I've lost, though, I refuse to let this defeat me. I know there would be something worse than living with the consequences of speaking my truth: living in silence. Let's hope potential employers take note: I didn't lose my job for being a hooker. I lost my job for being a writer.
– The hiring committee at Pittsburg High School took Amy Robertson's list of credentials—including supposed master’s and doctorate degrees—at face value. But not the school's students, whose investigation has since led to their new principal's resignation. After Robertson was hired for the job at the Kansas school last month, with an annual salary of $93,000, six student journalists writing for the school's Booster Redux newspaper began to dig into her past—only to find things "just didn’t quite add up," one student tells the Washington Post. For example, Corllins University, where Robertson claimed to have been educated, was accused of selling degrees, had no known physical address, and wasn't accredited by the Department of Education. Robertson told the students she attended Corllins before it lost accreditation, but she also "presented incomplete answers, conflicting dates, and inconsistencies in her responses," the Redux reported. Robertson, who has lived in Dubai for the last two decades, told the Kansas City Star last week that she wouldn't comment on her credentials because the students' "concerns are not based on facts." It was "red flags" about her time in Dubai that turned up during an electronic search of her name that prompted the students' full investigation; initially, one of the student journalists was planning to write a standard article introducing the students to their new principal. Ultimately, Robertson resigned Tuesday after she was unable to verify an undergraduate degree she said she received from the University of Tulsa, a Redux adviser tells the Post. The students are getting plenty of praise for their investigative work from professional journalists. The school superintendent, meanwhile, says it was up to the school board to review Robertson's credentials before approving the hire, which it did.