Lexi Churchill

Lexi Churchill is an investigative research reporter at ProPublica working with the Texas Tribune on joint projects that examine how public institutions, including schools, the military and law enforcement, fail the people they are meant to protect. Her recent work concentrates on school safety and accountability, with coverage spanning the Uvalde school shooting, state active shooter training requirements and the investigations and personnel changes that followed. Across these projects she helps drive multi-part series that combine deep document work with on-the-ground reporting to show how official decisions translate into harm and unresolved trauma.

Uvalde school shooting response and investigations

Churchill is a core member of the team that has investigated the law enforcement response to the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, documenting how the response was characterized as a failure in a federal review and tracing what that meant for accountability.

Her reporting follows the evolving investigations and personnel changes tied to the shooting, including detailed coverage of new records that reveal how the school district shifted its stance on supporting its police chief and how officials reconsidered their roles. This work extends into a FRONTLINE documentary that pairs ProPublica and Texas Tribune reporting with broadcast storytelling, underscoring the systemic nature of the response failures and elevating the consequences for families and the broader school community.

The Uvalde series has received national recognition for explanatory reporting, reflecting the scale and persistence of the team’s effort to untangle decisions made before, during and after the shooting.

Active shooter training and school safety requirements

Beyond Uvalde itself, Churchill has helped examine how states structure active shooter training for schools and law enforcement, comparing state-specific requirements and highlighting gaps between policy and practice. That reporting connects classroom safety drills, law enforcement preparedness and statutory mandates to the lived experience of students and educators, showing how training regimes translate into what happens during an actual crisis. By situating training rules alongside findings from the Uvalde investigations, she draws a line between regulatory language and real-world performance, emphasizing how education policy, public safety planning and institutional culture intersect.

The focus on school environments keeps the coverage grounded in education while making clear that decisions far from the classroom can shape the risks students face.

Military justice system and other accountability series

Churchill’s role on the ProPublica–Texas Tribune investigative initiative extends to reporting on the U.S. military justice system, where she has contributed to a series that probes how the military investigates and prosecutes wrongdoing in its ranks. That work includes outreach pieces inviting service members and families to share their experiences, a format that reflects a methodical approach to building cases from both official records and personal accounts. She has also helped report a series on preventable carbon monoxide poisonings across Texas, connecting individual tragedies to patterns in regulation, enforcement and public awareness.

Taken together, these projects show a consistent interest in systems that operate with their own rules and culture - military courts, housing oversight, emergency response - and in the consequences when those systems do not match their professed standards.

Education systems, religious institutions and bureaucratic harm

Earlier in her career at ProPublica, Churchill worked in a research-focused fellowship role and published an investigation into how a federal crackdown on Idaho’s Medicaid procedures created red tape that pushed children with special needs and the poorest residents off their insurance. She helped lead reporting on the “Sins of Omission” project, which detailed how the Catholic Church shielded priests credibly accused of sexual abuse, adding another layer to her coverage of institutions that shape young people’s lives while resisting transparency. Her work has also examined the University of Missouri’s Title IX appeals process, scrutinizing how sexual misconduct cases were handled and what that meant for students seeking recourse. In education-adjacent policy, she has co-reported on Texas efforts to remove supposed noncitizens from voter rolls that ended up canceling registrations of U.S. citizens, and on a case of a citizen whose registration was questioned, highlighting the administrative hazards that can disenfranchise eligible voters.

The investigation into Islamic private schools tied to a libel dispute further shows her attention to how religious and private education spaces are governed, who investigates them and how reputational battles connect to oversight. More recent work on Texas Hill Country flooding and the legislature’s failure to act on recommended safeguards again centers on public systems that promise protection but leave communities exposed. Across these strands, Churchill’s distinguishing focus is on the bureaucratic choices - within schools, churches, health programs and election offices - that quietly determine whether vulnerable people receive protection or face avoidable harm.