Book Bans in the Real World (Part II)

Looking beyond the fevered rhetoric to see who is really challenging books, and what they are challenging.

(Read Part I here.)

Earlier this year, I began requesting information from South Carolina school districts to find out, where possible, who is actually challenging books in the districts, and which books they are challenging. Most districts responded quickly to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and most of these required no payment for providing the requested information.

As the production of documents (collected in this folder) shows, there are usually only a few pages— if any— of documents to provide (with the notable exceptions of districts like Beaufort, which received almost 100 challenges from a single person, and Dorchester 2, which received almost 600 challenges from a single person, and which has so far evidently neglected to respond to my January FOIA request).

While state law allows public entities to collect fees to cover the cost of searching documents, I assume many districts felt it was in the public interest, and in their own interest, to have transparency abo…