Most school-library decisions happen far from the spotlight.
Librarians evaluate books. Educators consider age, context, literary value, and student needs. Parents decide what their own children may check out. When someone challenges a book, a committee reads the whole work, applies written criteria, and produces a recommendation.
That is what the Academy District 20 school board’s reconsideration process was supposed to do with Brian Katcher’s Almost Perfect.
It did.
Then the Academy District 20 school board rejected the result.
The review process produced a clear recommendation
A formal reconsideration request concerning Almost Perfect followed an informal response from the school principal explaining the book’s selection rationale. The challenge had been initiated by sitting board member Eddie Waldrep, acting through the parent reconsideration process.
On March 11, 2026, the District 20 reconsideration committee reviewed the book under IJL R 2. The committee scored it at 87.8%—comfortably above the policy’s 66% threshold for retention—and recommended that it remain at Rampart High School.
The superintendent or superintendent’s designee later determined that the required procedure had been followed.
Those facts matter because this was not an accidental placement, an unread book waved through by an indifferent committee, or a challenge dismissed without review. District 20 assembled the process its policy required. The committee considered the work. It applied the scoring system. It reached a documented result.
Retain the book.
That recommendation was not the end of the process. District policy permits an appeal to the Board, and the Board has discretion to accept it.
On June 11, it did.
What the Academy District 20 school board did
The official June 11 meeting recording and D20 agenda and packet document the hearing and vote.
The proceeding began with two appropriate recusals. Director Derrick Wilburn had served on the reconsideration committee. Director Waldrep was the appellant. Both stepped away from the Board’s consideration of the appeal.
That left Directors Susan Payne, Holly Tripp, and Amy Shandy.
The three remaining directors unanimously adopted Resolution 237-26, accepting the appeal. After conducting the hearing, they unanimously adopted Resolution 238-26.
The result was not merely a restriction at Rampart High School. The resolution removed Almost Perfect from all Academy District 20 school-library collections.
That is the precise action. Readers may commonly call it a book ban, but Colorado law does not define “book ban” as a legal category. The more exact description is a districtwide removal following a formal challenge and Board appeal.
Precision does not make the result smaller.
An individual parent in D20 may restrict what their own child borrows. Resolution 238-26 made the decision for every student using every District 20 school library.
The process was followed—and its result was reversed
There is a fairness point worth making.
The Board did not simply order the book to disappear through an administrative side door. District 20 used a formal committee, allowed an appeal, held a public hearing, recorded recusals, and took a public vote. That is materially more transparent than quietly removing a challenged title while hoping nobody notices the empty space.
The Board also possessed an appellate role under the district’s procedure. A committee recommendation was not binding merely because the committee reached it carefully or by a wide margin.
But lawful procedural authority is not immunity from public scrutiny.
The accountability question is not whether the Board was permitted to hear an appeal. It is why three directors rejected a committee’s 87.8% retention result after the district had already determined that the prescribed review procedure was followed.
An appeal should do more than provide officials with a second opportunity to prefer a different answer. If a Board reverses the product of its own evidence-review system, the public deserves to see exactly what standard changed, what evidence controlled, and why the committee’s analysis was insufficient.
Otherwise, the committee process begins to look less like a decision-making safeguard and more like an elaborate opening act.
A Board resolution is not a court ruling
Resolution 238-26 reportedly described Almost Perfect as “immoral” and “obscene” under the framework associated with Miller v. California.
That language carries legal weight, so it requires legal care.
The Board’s resolution documents the Board’s stated conclusion. It does not establish that a court has found the book legally obscene.
The constitutional obscenity test is substantially narrower than “this book contains sexual material” or “some parents consider this inappropriate.” It considers the work as a whole and asks, among other things, whether it appeals to a prurient interest, depicts specified sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. Colorado’s current statutory text is available in the official Colorado Revised Statutes.
That whole-work requirement is especially important here because District 20’s own committee had already reviewed the book and recommended retention by a wide margin.
Board members were entitled to disagree with the committee. But when public officials invoke a constitutional obscenity framework to justify districtwide removal, the explanation should show the work—not merely announce the conclusion.
Colorado law raised the standard for school-library removals
Colorado’s 2025 school-library law, enacted through SB 25-063 and published in Chapter 161 of the 2025 session laws, makes a formal reconsideration process the required route for removing a challenged public-school library resource. Routine collection maintenance remains a separate matter, but an objection alone cannot trigger immediate removal or restriction.
The law requires public districts to maintain written policies governing selection, retention, display, use, and reconsideration. Those policies must account for constitutional protections, including the principles of Board of Education v. Pico, and must guard against removing material merely to suppress disfavored ideas.
It also requires:
- Review under the district’s reconsideration policy before permanent removal.
- A formal request from a parent whose student is enrolled in the affected school.
- Consideration of constitutional, discrimination, and obscenity standards.
- Public availability of the final decision and its explanation.
- No removal or restriction merely because a request has been filed.
- A waiting period before the same resource may be reconsidered again.
District 20’s current IJL R 2 procedure incorporates many of those protections. It calls for whole-work review, a committee decision, public availability, procedural appeals, and protection against removing or restricting a resource before the formal determination is public.
That is the good news.
The more difficult question is whether those protections remain meaningful when the Board can reverse a strongly supported committee recommendation without publishing an equally substantive explanation.
The public record should not end with the video
The official June 11 recording documents the recusals, hearing, and two unanimous 3–0 votes. The meeting packet provides additional public documentation.
But the public-record review underlying this article did not locate June 11 minutes or a standalone final written determination explaining Resolution 238-26.
That finding should be framed carefully. It is a publication gap to verify, not proof that the district failed to create a required record or violated the statute.
Still, both Colorado law and D20 policy emphasize a publicly available final determination. A meeting video is valuable, but it is not a substitute for a clear, searchable written decision stating:
- What passages or features the Board evaluated.
- How it considered the work as a whole.
- How it applied each relevant legal and policy standard.
- Why it rejected the committee’s scoring and recommendation.
- Why districtwide removal was necessary instead of individual-family access controls.
If that written explanation exists, District 20 should make it easy to find.
Public accountability should not require residents to reconstruct a legal rationale from a multihour meeting recording, scattered packet pages, and a resolution number.
D20’s policy language also needs clarification
The Almost Perfect decision sits inside a broader policy framework that is mostly aligned with Colorado’s new requirements but contains unresolved wording questions.
District policy KEC appears to permit concerns from a wider range of people, including students, staff, residents, and certain vendors. State law, however, restricts the formal reconsideration request capable of supporting school-library removal to an enrolled parent at the affected school.
Those two lanes should be distinguished plainly. Many people may raise a concern. Not every concern qualifies as the formal statutory request that can lead to removal.
District 20’s procedure also does not appear to state expressly the statute’s rule against reconsidering the same resource more than once every two years. Its separate three-year provision is framed differently and does not obviously cover the same requirement.
These may be drafting issues rather than evidence of an improper decision. But policies governing speech, student access, and public-library resources should not rely on readers to infer which provision controls.
D20 has placed a review of IJL R 2 on its August 6 study-session agenda. The agenda does not identify a proposed amendment, and it does not establish that the review was caused by Almost Perfect.
It does create an opportunity.
The Board can clarify who may initiate a formal challenge, incorporate the statutory reconsideration interval, spell out the constitutional standards, and establish what a written appellate decision must contain when the Board reverses its review committee.
This is about more than one book
The human stakes are easy to lose in a dispute filled with policy codes and resolution numbers.
Students do not all come from the same households, hold the same beliefs, confront the same questions, or need the same books. Parents have a legitimate role in guiding their own children. Librarians and educators have a professional role in building collections for an entire school community.
Those two principles can coexist.
What does not follow is that one challenge should quietly become one answer for every family.
District 20 created a process designed to slow that leap. It required complete review, whole-work consideration, committee scoring, a written decision, and multiple levels of appeal. In the Almost Perfect case, that process produced a decisive recommendation to retain the book.
The Academy District 20 school board had the authority to disagree.
It also acquired the responsibility to explain, with equal rigor, why the process’s answer was wrong.
The committee showed its work. The public should expect the Board to show its own.
For additional context, readers can review author Brian Katcher’s response to the removal and the separate evidence review of statements Susan Payne made during the June 11 deliberation. Related District 20 material is collected in the site’s D20 Board of Education archive and school-libraries archive.