Meet Mara Klecker, a 2016 CoJMC graduate, Minnesota’s 2025 Young Journalist of the Year and the Regional Education Reporter for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Mara started covering the Twin Cities school districts for the Tribune in 2020 and has been with the paper for seven-plus years.
Her recent work highlights the sharp attendance drop at Minnesota schools due to families' anxieties over the heightened deployment of federal immigration enforcement, "What happened when Border Patrol agents showed up at Minneapolis’ Roosevelt High School,” the mobilization efforts of parents and neighbors outside schools and the lead-up to the ultimately averted Anoka-Hennepin teachers union strike.
Klecker is proud to work with the talented and thoughtful journalists in the Tribune newsroom who are quickly adapting to taking on more major, international stories.
“Moments like this are a reminder of why objective, independent local journalism — as well media literacy skills — matter so much. No matter where your career takes you, the curiosity and fact-finding skills you’re building in J-school will always be essential," Klecker said.
The summer after she graduated from the CoJMC, alumna Mara Klecker (‘16) moved to Minneapolis and spent three months working for The Minnesota Star Tribune as a metro reporting intern, covering the Twin Cities suburban metro area.
In Sept. 2016, she came back to Nebraska and joined the Omaha World-Herald as their social services reporter until June 2018, when she accepted her first full-time role with the Star Tribune as a Washington county reporter.
Her internship role came full-circle a little over a year later, when she began her work as the Star Tribune’s west metro reporter and started covering the Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area once again.
In August 2020, she switched gears and began reporting on the city’s education system as the Tribune’s Minneapolis schools reporter. In this role, she covered the challenges of remote learning amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, student homelessness, pivotal school board decisions, racial adversity, teachers strikes and more.
Four years later, she was promoted to regional education reporter and one month into her new role, released a three-part series that investigated the state’s charter school system.
