 High school journalists in Kansas investigated their principal and found discrepancies in her credentials, prompting her to resign. 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. 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. But officials there told The Star the school could have been accredited in the past. “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. “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. 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. 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. The Better Business Bureau’s website says Corllins’s physical address is unknown and the school isn’t a BBB-accredited institution. 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. 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. “The kids had never gone through someone like this before,” Brown said. But with that freedom came a major responsibility to get the story right, Smith said. “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.
– 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.