Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Superintendent Rodney Trice on April 23 became the first local government official to appear twice before House oversight committees. Committee members called him back out of frustration over the school district’s continued disregard of legislative intent behind the Parents’ Bill of Rights (SB49) passed in 2023.
Trice first appeared before the committee in December with former Board Chair George Griffin after videos surfaced of Griffin stating that the school board had refused to comply with the law. Trice and Griffin both testified under oath that the district had always been in compliance with the law as they sparred with members over the difference between board policy and administrative guidance, what materials are subject to the law, and the district’s responsibility for monitoring outside resources linked from its websites.
This time, Director of Digital Learning and Libraries Al McArthur joined Trice as a witness to discuss library holdings.
From the start, Chairman Brenden Jones (R-Columbus) demonstrated that teachers and school leadership as recently as February 2026 were unsure how to handle name and pronoun change requests.
Rep. Grant Campbell (R-Cabarrus) asked why the district still had guidance in 2026, after the last hearing, for school officials to find “a developmentally-appropriate manner to determine the best path forward for the school to affirm the student’s identity” if parents objected to gender and pronoun changes.
Campbell was the first of many committee members to ask Trice and McArthur whether sexually explicit books were appropriate in grade school libraries and what role libraries and library books have in support of the curriculum. It took nearly two hours before McArthur told Rep. Harry Warren (R-Rowan) “No,” it would not be appropriate to have those books in the library. Next, Trice acknowledged to Rep. Mike Schietzelt (R-Wake) that every book in the library is tied to the curriculum in that they are there to encourage literacy and reading. “So, if we’re serving students’ literacy by serving student interests then aren’t we supplementing the curriculum with these books? And wouldn’t that fit squarely within the definition that we have right here in the statute that has been read over and over and over in today’s hearing?” Claiming otherwise, Schietzelt said, was just “silly.”
Subverting the law
Rep. Jake Johnson (R-Polk) and Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Nash) both commented on what Johnson called the district’s, “willful effort to subvert the intent of Senate Bill 49.”
Chesser added, “I think what we are witnessing is an administration that is hellbent on circumventing the law in any way they can.”
Trice claimed that the district’s website is not covered under SB49. He told Rep. Brian Echevarria (R-Cabarrus) that a committee reviews changes to the website but that a rogue employee hid, but did not delete, CHCCS-created LGBTQIA+ resource pages after the district received the first letter from the Committee in November. (Those pages still exist but the links are still not on the equity page.)
To illustrate the types of books with explicit material that CHCCS schools have chosen to be on their shelves, Jones displayed a photo of a page from “Grandad’s Pride” by Harry Woodgate and read a passage from “It Feels Good to Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity” by Theresa Thorn and “My Maddy” by Gayle E. Pitman.
Jones closed by announcing that he had filed HB1043—the CHCCS Act (for Curriculum, Honesty, Compliance, and Child Safety) which would close some of the loopholes identified in the hearing, clarify legislative intent, and cut central office funding for willfully noncompliant school districts.
Watch the hearing on YouTube here.