AUBURN, Washington – After a series of low-paying jobs, Nicole Slemp finally landed one she loved. She was a secretary for Washington’s child services department, a job that came with her own cubicle, and she had a knack for working with families in difficult situations. This story also appeared in AL.com and Idaho Education News […]
Sharon Lurye
Sharon Lurye is a data journalist with the Associated Press. Previously she was a reporting intern for the Hechinger Report. Born in New Jersey, she attended the University of Chicago for undergrad, where she majored in public policy with a focus on urban education. She worked for four years as a tutor in neighborhood schools in Chicago and wrote her undergraduate thesis on the effects of the mass closure of Chicago's public schools. After college she worked at the Burlington County Times and PhillyVoice.com before moving to New Orleans to serve as a City Year Corps Member with AmeriCorps. She taught middle-school math in a charter school and founded the school's first student newspaper, The Tea Today. Realizing that she was having more fun as editor of the student newspaper than as a math teacher, she went back to journalism and enrolled in the Columbia University School of Journalism, which she graduated from in 2018.
