At Schwarz’s Supper Club in St. Anna, you still put your name in at the door, order an old fashioned at the bar and wait for your table. Ziggy and Evelyn Schwarz opened it as a country tavern in 1957, and their family has run it ever since. We wrote about it because places like that are a big part of why we love this state.
Three years ago this month, I started Dairyland Sentinel to tell those stories, to celebrate what works here, examine what doesn’t and to ask hard questions of the people who run Wisconsin. Since then we’ve published 1,121 posts on this site and, since February 2024, 683 weekday editions of our Key Reads newsletter. We’ve broken news, made news and curated news, and we’ve amplified the good work of others. We’ve celebrated the greatest state in the nation, and we haven’t shied away from pointing out when it fell short. A few of those stories are worth revisiting.
- In June 2024, Milwaukee Public Schools was in trouble for failing to send financial reports to the state. State law also requires the MPS board to file its annual financial report with the Milwaukee city clerk. So we asked the clerk. His office’s holdings showed nothing filed after the 2003-04 school year. MPS had been out of compliance with state law for decades.
- That November, Attorney General Josh Kaul released the state crime lab’s 2023 annual report without drawing attention to its backlogs. We read the report anyway. Average turnaround time in the controlled substances unit rose from 84 days to 110. In trace evidence, it went from 79 days to 202.
- Our longest fight has been with the Department of Public Instruction. In January 2025, I asked DPI for records on how it rewrote the Forward Exam proficiency benchmarks. It took more than a year, and a demand letter from the Institute for Reforming Government on our behalf, before DPI confirmed the price: $368,885 for a four-day workshop at the Chula Vista Resort, a waterpark resort in Wisconsin Dells. That same afternoon, the Joint Finance Committee put off a vote to release $1 million to DPI. Co-chair Rep. Mark Born, R-Beaver Dam, cited our report. Last week we told you that two state audits of DPI have slipped to fall, and that the Legislative Audit Bureau denied our request for records showing why.
- We follow the money, too. This spring we documented $739,700.44 in spending by the Washington-based State + Local Election Alliance in Wisconsin’s nonpartisan city races, with Waukesha County as its main target.
- In August, we were first to find a $52,900 payment from Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez’s suspended campaign to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. The memo line read, “Funds borrowed from C4 account in error.”
Then there’s Key Reads, our free weekday morning email. It takes about four minutes to read. Since it’s inception a few months after we launched this website, our newsletter has averaged a 58% open rate and a click rate above 20%. To me, that says you want the news straight, without the spin and free of rage bait..
Our mission hasn’t changed, and I’m recommitting to it today as we celebrate this anniversary. We continue to cover Wisconsin business, government, history and the stuff we love about this state. And we’re not sitting still. In fact, we’re building a redesigned website to make all our work easier to find. You’ll see it in the next few weeks and we think you’ll love it.
Dairyland Sentinel is a nonprofit, and readers keep it going. If you’d like to help, you can support our work here, or sign up for Key Reads for free.
Regardless of the ebbs and flows of the economy or political campaigns, I believe Wisconsin’s best days can still be ahead of it. I also believe the people who plow its roads, milk its cows, teach its kids, and keep its supper clubs open deserve media that reflects them, respects them, and tells them the truth. That’s the job here.
Three years in, I’ve never been more sure it’s worth doing.
Thanks for reading. Here’s to year four, and to the greatest state in the nation.
On, Wisconsin!
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