Open Records and the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI
In January 2025, Dairyland Sentinel requested records from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction related to its June 2024 Forward Exam standard-setting workshop at Chula Vista Resort in Wisconsin Dells.
We expected records.
Instead, we found a much bigger story. It took more than a year, and it still isn’t over. Along the way, the records revealed spending, contracts, and internal practices that had never been publicly examined.
It inspired us to dig deeper and take a broader look at government transparency in Wisconsin. Over the next four months, Dairyland Sentinel reviewed press accounts, court opinions, appellate decisions, lawsuits, settlements, agency correspondence, public records and documented disputes involving Wisconsin state government dating back to late 2021.
The deeper we dug, the more familiar the stories became. None of these cases is new. What is new is seeing them together.
Different agency. Different requester. Different issue. Yet, the same roadblocks kept showing up.
Some requests sat for months, others for more than a year.
