By Mark A Murphy PhD, JD
Part I of this column, published in the High Country Press December 7, 2023, summarized the new North Carolina “Parent’s Bill of Rights,” which became NC State law on December 1, 2023. The new law imposes new transparency and accountability requirements on NC teachers, staff, local Boards of Education and school districts. The law also gives NC parents new rights to access the materials used in their child’s education, and new rights to control their children’s education, medical decisions, and the collection and sharing of the family’s personal information.
This article will first recount certain issues and controversies in the Watauga County Schools (“WCS”) during the last few years (especially the Pandemic years) and then describe how the NC Parent’s Bill of Rights will help reveal and force the schools to address some of those issues and controversies.
During the Pandemic, many parents in Watauga became very concerned about the potential for learning loss and/or social and psychological damage potentially caused by the mandatory masking and school lockdowns. Having had some teacher training years before, and having a deep background and experience in science, chemistry, biology, and law, I was also very concerned. The scientific literature had for many years concluded that most common masks provide very little (if any) protection against airborne aerosol diseases. I decided to attend some meetings of the WCS Board of Education.
After attending multiple such meetings, I found that the WCS Board meetings and their agendas overwhelmingly focused on “atta boys” for staff and students, and “happy talk” presentations about various projects. Nothing was wrong with that “per se”, but with one exception, controversies, and potentially negative issues and problems were never mentioned at the public meetings. The exception was that parents were permitted to make three-minute public comments to the Board. Those parental comments expressed many concerns, but I never once witnessed the Board Members or WCS administrators respond in any way to those parent comments, either during or after the meetings.
After the meetings, I talked with multiple parents who attended but would not speak. I was told by many of those parents that they had major concerns about many other issues besides masking and lockdowns. One of them gave me a lesson sheet that had been recently passed out by a Watauga middle-school Social Studies teacher. The lesson text railed against “White Privilege” and “systemic racism”, and claimed that many white people, especially men, were “paralyzed by guilt” and “withdraw into silence,” and feel as if they are being “personally attacked and blamed for something they didn’t do.” The text also railed against people who allegedly “think of things only in terms of individuals”, which “promotes divisive competition and makes it harder to sustain a sense of community.”
Another parent gave me the text of a lesson on the Civil War from an English class at Watauga High School. The teacher had required the students circle every occurrence of the word “men”, and then specifically singled out the young teenage men in her classroom, and specifically shamed and denigrated them in the classroom, for events that occurred 150 years before they were born. Another parent reported that her elementary school son had been severely disciplined as a “bully”, for failing to understand and use “preferred personal pronouns.” Another parent complained that her children were forced to fill out (without her permission) intrusive information surveys that demanded very personal information about family sexual, religious, and political preferences. Each parent was very upset, but unwilling to speak out publicly, fearing ridicule, “cancelation”, or even retaliations against themselves or their children.
Concerned, I filed a Freedom of Information request to WCS, seeking financial information about how much and for what WCS was spending its tax money on. Based on the FOIA information I noticed that WCS was spending $40,000 a year for “Newsela”, which provides nationalized “news” materials to K-12 teachers and students, through their computers. Newsela rewrites, down to reading levels as low as 3d grade, news stories taken from national “Progressive” media outlets and radical Progressive college professors and institutes, then distributes the rewritten “woke” news stories to teachers and students daily, without review of the re-written articles by anyone else. After becoming a trial “Newsela Certified Instructor”, I was able to directly access all the Newsela “news” lessons, most of which are not directly accessible to parents.
I was shocked by many of the Newsela “news” stories. They were filled with “woke” and politicized propaganda, and many of the concepts of Critical Race Theory, including subjects such as “identity”, “Systemic Racism”, “White Privilege”, “micro-aggressions”, “intersectionality”, gender, sex, and sexuality, and political “resistance”. Several stories praised the riots following the killing of George Floyd, and repeatedly praised elementary school children for “leading” “political protest” related to a wide variety of “Progressive” issues.
Extremely concerned, I wrote a “Letter to the Editor” of the High Country Press on August 10, 2022, describing what I had found. On September 1, 2022, I sent copies of the documents I had collected to the WCS Board of Education (and High Country Press and Watauga Democrat), and requested (under WCS procedures) an Agenda item for the September 12, 2022 Board meeting. The request was denied. The only “substantive” response I received was an August 22 reply letter in the High Country Press from Mr. Jay Fenwick, then and now a member of the WCS Board of Education. Even though he had never met or talked to me, and could not have known anything relevant about me, his response letter made false claims and attempted to defame me, the High Country Press, and it’s readers as “Extremists”. In a reply letter on August 30, 2022 I asked Mr. Fenwick to stop the personalized name-calling, and again asked the Board address the issues. I got no further replies.
Fortunately, the new NC Parent’s Bill of Rights will now provide much needed and legally enforceable transparency and responsiveness in North Carolina public schools. Parents now have a legal right to see the materials their children are educated with. Parents can now regain some control of their child’s education, medical, and/or psychological decisions. The teaching of radical gender theories is illegal for kindergarten through 4th grade. Parents can opt their children out of classes in reproductive and religious matters they find objectionable and opt out of intrusive information surveys. And none too soon….
Mark A Murphy PhD, JD is a retired Industrial / Pharmaceutical Chemist and Patent Attorney who lives just outside Blowing Rock.