Spent 3 weeks chasing a missing challenged-book list in a Wisconsin school district, and the answer was in a storage closet

Iris Owens · 2026-10-21T13:55:12.312337+00:00

Back in 2011 I helped a small library in Janesville put together a display of books that had been pulled from local schools over the decades, and I figured finding the old challenge records would be a weekend job. It took 21 days. The district office had digitized everything except the 1980s and 90s, so I ended up driving to three buildings and digging through banker boxes in a supply closet behind the gym. Turned out the "missing" records were misfiled under a teacher's name who retired in 1996. Anybody else deal with a district that had the records the whole time but just buried them somewhere weird?

Free To Speak

Loading…

Spent 3 weeks chasing a missing challenged-book list in a Wisconsin school district, and the answer was in a storage closet | Banned Book Breakdown - Free To Speak