Accusations of grooming, mentions of vulvas, and the hurling of books—not an ordinary morning in the North Carolina General Assembly, but just another day in America’s culture wars.
This week, the N.C. House Select Committee on Oversight and Reform came into session to grill Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) board Chair George Griffin and Superintendent Rodney Trice.
Officially, the committee sought to ask Griffin about a clip from a candidate forum in which he described the board saying “no thank you” to two provisions of the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” as passed by the legislature in 2023.
At the hearing, Griffin and Trice quietly told legislators that they have been following the law and that the clip was a “misunderstanding,” because the district had put all the necessary provisions into either policy or procedure, despite Griffin’s comments.
But no one seemed all that interested in parsing the specifics of what CHCCS is actually doing or not doing.
“You’re not here because of a misunderstanding. You’re here because you chose to wage war against the law,” committee Chair Rep. Brenden Jones, who represents Columbus and Robeson counties, told Griffin and Trice at the beginning of the meeting. “You weren’t just indoctrinating, you were grooming.”
In January 2024, the CHCCS board did discuss the possibility of not complying with the Parents’ Bill of Rights, specifically the provision that requires districts to notify parents of any changes to the name or pronouns a student uses at school prior to the change. That clause caused some consternation in liberal areas like Chapel Hill and Carrboro, where voters have elected a school board that has favored LGBT+-affirmative language and procedures. Opponents of the law have argued that it could force teachers to “out” LGBT+ students to their parents before they are ready, while the law’s supporters say that it helps give power back to parents, who should have the final say over their children’s education.
While the board didn’t put that clause into the school system’s policy, they did vote to direct the superintendent to put that provision into guidance for staff, which they argue satisfies the words of the law.
That procedure, per Trice’s written testimony, requires school employees to have the following conversation with a student if they request to be called by a different name or pronoun: “There is a law in our state that requires that I notify your parents before making this change. Have you already talked to your parents/guardians about this? Do you have any concerns about my notifying them? Tell me about your concerns.”
The second provision that the CHCCS board didn’t put into its policy was a ban on “instruction on gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality” in the K-4 curriculum. The board, in 2024, said they did not adopt that provision because they already had a compliant policy about the health curriculum.
Throughout the hearing, Griffin and Trice tried to make CHCCS as small a target as possible. They didn’t argue with the legislators or take any impassioned stances. They sat quietly, in a room of occasionally smirking audience members and staffers, as the Republican legislators railed against wokeness.
At the meeting’s most theatrical, Jones held up books, apparently from a third-party suggested reading list that the district had previously linked to on its website.
“These are my eyes, this is my nose, this is my vulva, these are my toes,” read Jones from a picture book. “This is damn trash,” he said as he tossed the book on the floor behind him to join the recently flung Santa’s Husband.
“I hope y’all can see what these children, 4-year-olds, are looking at,” Jones said as he held up a page of illustrated, racially diverse, naked people with dangling, cartoonishly undefined “willies” in It Isn’t Rude to be Nude.
When legislators did engage directly with the school officials, it was about as informative as this example exchange:
Jones: Is making woke kids in your district the mission now?
Trice: I’m sorry, what do—
Jones: Is making woke kids in your district the mission now?
Trice: I’m not sure what you mean by making woke kids—
Democrats on the committee were more friendly to the officials.
Guilford County Rep. Amos Quick apologized to Griffin and Trice, citing his “secondhand embarrassment for the way this meeting is being done.” Buncombe County Rep. Eric Ager said it was “frustrating” that the school officials had been dragged in “as props for some political theater,” and Wake County Rep. Allison Dahle said that, as a gay woman, she would be “kind of proud” if they were, in fact, skirting the law.
Political theater aside, it’s not yet clear what consequences the legislature may impose on one of the state’s highest-performing districts, or if the public lambasting was punishment enough. North Carolina school districts get a large chunk of funding from the state, which several hostile legislators pointed out to Griffin and Trice.
Wake County Rep. Maria Cervania, a Democrat, told the INDY that she wouldn’t “put it past” Republicans to include some sort of retribution in future legislation, even though “our constitutional responsibility is to educate all our students in North Carolina,” she said.
After the hearing, CHCCS spokesperson Andy Jenks told the INDY via email, “We appreciated the opportunity to answer questions and clarify any misunderstandings. As our testimony demonstrated, CHCCS is in compliance with the law.”
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