Phillip Sitter

Phillip Sitter is the News Tribune's education reporter. He covers governance and daily life at local schools and school districts, pre-K through grade 12, including reports on board and committee meetings; finances; school achievement and performance topics and issues; academic programs; facility expansions or renovations; partnerships with community agencies and organizations; and features on the activities, accomplishments, and personalities of students and staff. Education tends to overlap with topics like health, science, technology, community service and nonprofit groups, the arts, military service, and even disaster relief and recovery. Sitter also reports on some education topics on the state and national levels as they relate to local experiences particularly through education-related bills in the Missouri House and Senate as they are filed and debated. His time at the News Tribune has been his first full-time job in journalism, although he's a graduate student at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism and has written for the Columbia Missourian and MU's Bond Life Sciences Center. He previously contributed to the News Tribune while working on the Missourian's state government beat. Sitter lives in Jefferson City and is originally from northwestern Illinois. Outside of journalism, he has worked in agriculture and in retail. He obtained his bachelor's degree in political science with a minor in Catholic social tradition from the University of Notre Dame in 2012 and lived in Washington, D.C., for a year after that while he began law school, before ultimately deciding that wasn't the career he wanted to pursue. He has also lived in London, United Kingdom, and New Orleans, Louisiana, for study-abroad and service opportunities. Follow him on Twitter at @pslifeisabeauty.