On May 17, 2026, LION published its audit of the Allen Independent School District List 4 book-purchase proposal. The audit compared the proposed List 4 purchase — 818 titles set for a Board of Trustees vote on May 26, 2026 — against the district’s own production in response to the Texas Public Information Act request ALLENISD-PIA-001. The Texas Public Information Act (PIA), codified at Texas Government Code Chapter 552, gives Texas residents the right to request records held by government bodies, including school districts. List 4 is the fourth in a series of district book-purchase lists brought to the Board for approval under the Allen ISD library-materials selection policy.

The audit drew on the district’s PIA-001 production only — approximately 775 pages across parts PT1 through PT14. No outside reviews, no third-party databases, and no external commentary were used. The findings are what the district’s own response document says — or fails to say — about the books it asked its trustees to approve.

The findings are framed as a documentation and process failure rather than a content critique of any individual title. Three structural findings anchor that frame.

Roughly forty-five percent of List 4 carried no third-party basis in the district’s own response. Across the Elementary and Middle School portions of the production — where the entries are clean enough to count without optical-character-recognition uncertainty — at least 368 of the 818 books showed no professional review citation, no state-list citation (Bluebonnet, Tayshas, Lone Star, Topaz, Tejas, Maverick, 2×2), and no award citation (Caldecott, Newbery, Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpé, Sibert, Printz, Orbis Pictus, Batchelder, Junior Library Guild) anywhere in the entry block. With the Lowery Freshman Center and Allen High School campuses added in, the share rises further; the forty-five percent figure is the conservative floor the district’s own pages support.

District-authored notes and publisher marketing copy together accounted for more source-label cells than the district’s own stated professional-review sources combined. Source-label cells were tallied across the Elementary, Middle School, Lowery Freshman Center, and Allen High School sections of the production. Librarian Note — district-authored prose — was the single most frequent source label, appearing on 262 cells (37 percent). From the Publisher — vendor marketing copy — appeared on 160 cells (23 percent). When the From Follett vendor-supplied entries (46 cells) are added, district-authored notes plus vendor-supplied copy reached 468 source-label cells. The district’s own stated professional-review sources — Booklist, Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, Hornbook, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal — together accounted for 482 cells across the same sections, a roughly even split. Within that professional category, Booklist alone carried 255 cells (36 percent), Publishers Weekly 86, School Library Journal 55, Horn Book 38, Kirkus 2, and Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books zero.

One entry on List 4 contradicted itself across two parts of the same production. Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping (ISBN 9781546171478) appeared in the Middle School section with roughly 200 words of School Library Journal review text and roughly 200 words of Publishers Weekly review text reproduced verbatim. The same physical ISBN appeared in the Lowery Freshman Center section with a Librarian Note declaring “No reviews; approved list 1.” The reviews demonstrably existed; the LFC entry’s claim that they did not was, on the face of the district’s own response document, false.

The framing — documentation broken in the district’s own record — supports a vote-to-defer or vote-to-table motion at the May 26 meeting and a follow-on PIA sequence rather than any claim about specific book content.

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