NC Republicans unveil amendment to Senate bill that would destroy public education as we know it

Just as North Carolina Republicans love to do, last week they introduced a horrifying and expansive education bill in the middle of the night that, if passed, will destroy the state’s public education system.

The bill, a “committee substitute” to Senate Bill 90, which deals with searches of students at school, is full of right-wing anti-public school ideas that the party has only dreamed of implementing but have rarely ever been passed into law.

According to NC Newsline, “the bill seeks to clarify and reinforce the rights of parents to raise their children in a manner that they see fit,” a common theme among Republican legislation so far this session.

The bill would drastically change how public schools would be allowed to function. Just a few of those changes include:

• Give parents the right to appeal to Superior Court if they believe their child’s school has violated their fundamental right to raise their children how they choose.
• Allow county school superintendents to be fired or lose pay after five successful claims that they violated the fundamental right to parent – this would give right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty the power to essentially fire whichever superintendents they want to.
• Require licensed school personnel to tell parents if their child is identifying as a gender different from the student’s biological sex.
• Forbid districts from teaching fourth and fifth graders about gender identity, sexual activity or sexuality in their sex education classes.
• Require public libraries to keep material deemed harmful to minors in an age-restricted area of the library.

Those are just some of the lowlights. The provision that resulted in the most backlash was the one allowing the removal of superintendents.

According to NC Newsline, Stuart Egan, a Forsyth County public school teacher and popular education commentator, called the idea an “Orwellian construct to allow the loudest, most easily irritated people to have so much political power that they can literally shut down a public school system.”

Public comment on the bill, which was scheduled for Wednesday, has been pushed back to next week at the earliest.