Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools has formed a task force to get feedback on how to comply with a new state law known as the Parents’ Bill of Rights.
Overridden by the General Assembly after Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto, the law requires school districts to notify parents in advance of surveys, permits parents to review materials checked from the library and used in classrooms, limits instruction on gender identity and sexuality in grades K-4 and requires schools to notify parents when students ask to be called by a different name or different pronoun than what is listed in school records.
In addition, the law says that “staff should never encourage or coerce a child into keeping a secret from their parents.”
Dionne Jenkins, the school district’s general counsel, gave an overview of the law at school board committee meeting on Tuesday.
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“There’s not a whole lot here that is new,” Jenkins said. “There are a lot of rights that parents already had that existed in other bodies of the law.”
One big change, and the one that is getting the most attention, is the mandate that schools alert parents if a student wishes to go by another name or another pronoun.
LGBTQ advocates say that such notification may harm students who have not come out to their parents.
One parent, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her transgender son, called the legislation “dangerous.”
“If Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools enacts this, we will lose children. That has been proven time and time again. There are families where it is not safe for them to be who they are,” the parent said.
Children put in this situation may harm themselves or runaway and put themselves in danger, the parent said.
“School should be a safe place,” the parent said. “There’s something that teachers try to do in every classroom and that’s to build trust with their kids so that learning can happen.”
School board member Alex Bohannon said last week that he is also concerned about the impact that the legislation will have on students and the burden it puts on staff.
“There are teachers thinking ‘How am I supposed to develop trust in my classroom and navigate this?’” Bohannon said.
Parents are entitled to have as much information on their children as possible, Bohannon said, but the law may have unintended consequences.
“However well-meaning, I’m not entirely convinced at this time that there won’t be some impact on our most marginalized students,” Bohannon said.
Parts of the law have been left to school districts to interpret. Lots of kids, for instance, want to be called names other than what is officially listed, a point that board member Leah Crowley raised.
“Is there anything we can to pre-empt this so that we’re not putting an undue burden on the staff for every William who goes by Will?” Crowley asked Jenkins.
Jenkins answered that the district has formed a task force of staff members representing teachers, student services and nurses, among others, to go over the law and help craft the district’s policy.
“We’re working through the logistics of how to make it as less burdensome as possible,” Jenkins said.
Superintendent Tricia McManus said school leaders advised teachers at the beginning of the year to reach out to them if they have questions on this portion of the law. Part of what the school district is reviewing is how notifying parents may put a child in danger, she said.
“We’re doing it case by case,” she said about parent notification.
Once the policy is crafted, it will come before the full school board for a vote, which will need to happen sometime Jan. 1.
Earlier this week, the Campaign for Southern Equality released a memo saying that the provision of the law that pertains to preferred names and pronouns creates a hostile environment that violates Title IX, a federal law that bars discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities.
Based in Asheville, the advocacy organization is calling on school boards to suspend or postpone compliance of the law until the N.C. Department of Public Instruction has a chance to review the Title IX issues.
“Schools cannot comply with Title IX while following the portions of S.B. 49 gratuitously harming LGBTQ students. The choice between Title IX and S.B. 49 is no choice at all; schools must follow Title IX,” according to the memo.
