Carol Brzozowski is an award-winning freelance journalist based in Florida. She studied theology at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach, Florida, and is a former religion writer for the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.

Megan O’Matz is a reporter at ProPublica, where she covers issues out of Wisconsin.

O’Matz comes to ProPublica from the South Florida Sun Sentinel, where she worked for two decades. She was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for stories on widespread fraud in federal disaster aid programs. She also shared in the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for public service for reporting on the Parkland school shooting. O’Matz has worked for the Chicago Tribune, the Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the Pittsburgh Press.

Jennifer Smith Richards is a reporter for ProPublica. She began her journalism career writing obituaries in West Virginia, then covering small-town southern Ohio. She wrote about schools and education at newspapers in Huntington, West Virginia; Utica, New York; Savannah, Georgia, and Columbus, Ohio. She most recently worked for the Chicago Tribune, where her work exposed student ticketing at school, abusive educators, government misspending, sexual abuse in schools, lapses in police accountability and the mistreatment of students with disabilities.