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.
Rep. Brenden Jones (R-Columbus) and other members of the House Select Committee on Oversight and Reform pressed Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) officials on the district’s defiance of state law, promoted resources, educational performance, enrollment, and finances during a contentious hearing on December 10.
Co-Chair Jones warned from the outset that the hearing would be uncomfortable. He told CHCCS Board Chair George Griffin and Superintendent Rodney Trice: “You are here today because you chose to wage war against the law. You chose to deceive the public, and now you are here because you got caught.”
The committee called Griffin and Trice to testify after a video in October showed Griffin bragging that CHCCS “was the only school district in North Carolina…that stood up to the General Assembly” on SB 49, The Parents’ Bill of Rights. The bill became law in August 2023 when the General Assembly overrode Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto. In January 2024, the school board voted unanimously to disregard two provisions of the law: a requirement to notify parents before changing their student’s name or gender, and a prohibition on sex and gender curriculum for children in grades kindergarten through fourth.
Despite repeated assurances to committee members that the district was complying with the law, Griffin eventually acknowledged that he thought the law conflicted with federal anti-discrimination law.
Jones held up three books on a list linked from the equity office’s resources page that could introduce young children to topics that should not be in the curriculum for young students under SB 49.
Trice said he was not familiar with the books or the link, but he said a rogue employee could not have posted the link without approval: “We have a multidisciplinary team that reviews materials or resources, particularly if those resources are going to be shared with parents.”
Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools has a reputation as one of the best school districts in the state, and Trice said, “Certainly I would put the success of our students squarely to our parents. They’re very involved with the education and the direction of our school district. They demand high quality curricula, strong instructional approaches in the classroom. And beyond that, I would put our teachers up against any teachers in North Carolina or across the country for that matter.”
He was defensive of the district’s performance, but he did admit, “We struggled like many districts with closing opportunity gaps and achievement gaps in our district.” Committee staff analysis of state standardized testing found black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged students performed comparably to their peers in other school districts, and well below Asian and white students in CHCCS. White students were the only racial or ethnic group in CHCCS to outperform the state average for that group. [see graphs below]
“For the better part of a decade,” Trice said, “we’ve seen … declining enrollment,” which he called the district’s “biggest challenge” because enrollment is “one of the primary ways that school districts across North Carolina receive funding to educate their kids.” Rep. Charles Miller (R-Brunswick, New Hanover) was among those who questioned the district’s financial situation considering the district’s shrinking enrollment.
Rep. Mike Schietzelt (R-Wake) put the district’s enrollment and financial challenges in context with the legislature’s budget fight: “There’s a lot of mounting distrust with the public school districts as reflected by the declining enrollment right now.” Noting that the House budget included a significant raise for teachers, he added, “We care about the teachers because we care about the kids, and it makes it really difficult for us to do our job when the leaders of these school districts can’t come in here and even give us a straightforward answer to straightforward questions.”
“What you’re doing is wrong, and you lied to this committee under oath,” Jones emphasized. “You’ve replaced reading, math, and science with guilt, shame, and division. You’re teaching kids to feel guilty, either oppressed based on color of their skin, their family values, or what they believe. And while performing gaps grow wider and test scores fall off a cliff, you focused on one thing, spreading your ideology.”
“Let me be real clear,” he said in conclusion, “This General Assembly will use every tool, every statute, and every ounce of our authority to protect children and to force you to comply with the law. If you don’t follow it willingly, we will hold you to the fire with every legal and legislative mechanism in our power. You’ve made your choice, and we’ve made ours.”