The hiring of a transgender teacher at a Wake County elementary school has drawn national attention and heated comments at school board meetings.
Some parents want to take their children out of the teacher's class and say they weren't given that option. They are threatening to sue the school district if their requests aren't met.
WUNC producer Will Michaels spoke with education reporter Liz Schlemmer about the situation.
Liz, can you walk us through the situation?
Over the summer, Middle Creek Elementary in Apex hired a music teacher who identifies as a trans woman. She presents as a woman and uses female pronouns.
Republican state representative Erin Paré posted about it on X in July. The story was picked up by accounts like Libs of TikTok, and has spread to conservative outlets like Breitbart and Fox News as well as liberal platforms like LGBTQ Nation.
The teacher has avoided all media attention and interviews. We're not using her name to protect her privacy.
What has the public reaction been locally? What are the parents of Wake County students saying?
On one hand are parents like Cal Foshee, a Middle Creek Elementary parent who spoke out in support of the teacher:
"History tells us this playbook is nothing new,” Foshee said. “Fifteen years ago, these same hand-wringing arguments were used against gay teachers. Fifty years ago, they were used against Black teachers. It's the same exact intolerance repackaged for a new decade."
On the other side are parents at the same school who say they have real concerns. Becky Lew Hobbs, president of the Wake County chapter of Moms for Liberty, said no one is asking for the teacher to be dismissed.
"All they've ever asked for is for their child to be excused from that class because it's bringing questions up to five, six, seven, and eight-year-olds that they don't think those children are ready to discuss about sexuality and gender,” Hobbs said.
Parents upset that they were not allowed to opt their child out of the class are now working with attorneys at the Thomas More Society, a conservative Catholic-affiliated law firm. They sent a letter to Wake County school administrators threatening legal action if their requests aren't met.
What are they asking for?
In addition to opting out of the class, they're asking for their children not to be disciplined for calling the teacher "Mr." or using male pronouns. They're asking for written assurances that gender identity will not be discussed by teachers; that the music teacher will not be permitted to use a restroom at the same time as a student; and that school staff will not retaliate against children who opt out of class.
What they're not asking for is for the teacher to be fired. There are legal protections for employment without discrimination to gender identity.
What does the legal landscape look like on these issues? How have cases like this played out in courts?
The letter actually reads a lot like a legal complaint, and it references case law, including some relatively recent U.S. Supreme Court cases that legal experts say have changed the landscape around parental rights.
I reached out to Emily Gold Waldman, a law professor at Pace University, who recently published a paper in the North Carolina Law Review about these parental rights cases. In Mahmoud vs. Taylor, the Supreme Court decided in 2025 that parents should be allowed to opt their children out of instruction using LGBTQ+-inclusive storybooks.
"The Supreme Court said that by not letting parents opt their children out of the parts of the school day where the storybooks were used, the school district was likely violating their free exercise rights to direct the religious upbringing of their children, and so they held that the school was going to have to let the parents opt out,” Waldman said. “And that's a big change in terms of how lower courts had thought about this in the past."
She said before this, courts generally ruled that parents' rights were protected by the fact that they didn't have to send their child to a public school. They could go to a private school or home school.
North Carolina also passed a Parents' Bill of Rights in 2023, and one of the rights outlined is to direct their children's religious and moral upbringing.
And there are some more recent developments that could apply here. There's a new state law requiring school districts to let students leave school for at least an hour a week for religious instruction, and parents are asking if they can utilize the district's new policy to pull their students from the music class.
What happens next?
The Thomas More Society declined a WUNC News request for an interview. In a statement, the law firm said Wake County Public Schools has a choice to either "work with these families in good faith or leave them no choice but to take this to court."
The letter gave the school district a deadline of Sept. 30 to respond. I asked a Wake County Schools spokesperson if they plan to, or if the district has a response to the Thomas More Society's statement. The response I received is that they have nothing to add.
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