Chapel Hill-Carrboro parents: Don’t you have bigger worries than our books, lawmakers?
The author is writing this on behalf of nearly 400 CHCCS parents who have signed on in support:
We come together as parents of kids in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools to set the record straight about how our district’s administrators support learning for all of our students and respect the wishes of district parents regarding literature in our school libraries. On April 23, representatives in the North Carolina General Assembly held a hearing at which many of them – though none who actually represent our district – attacked our superintendent and libraries director for including in elementary school libraries books reflecting the fact that families with same-sex parents or children of different gender identities exist. We want these lawmakers to understand that the parents of this district overwhelmingly support our children’s access to books with characters that all of our kids can relate to and books that accurately reflect the world our kids live in rather than the one some lawmakers appear eager to impose upon them.
North Carolina’s public schools, including those in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, face enormous problems. Most of those problems stem from these same lawmakers’ failure to pass a state budget for nearly three years, their chronic underfunding of public education, their failure to pay teachers a fair salary while prices on gas and rent and groceries and so much more continue to climb, and their siphoning of state funding away from our public schools to benefit a voucher program that serves wealthy families and practically no one else.
Teachers earn less in North Carolina than they do in 42 states, and we are second to last nationwide in our investment per pupil. These figures should embarrass our elected officials. Rep. Brendan Jones, who chaired last week’s hearing, hails from a county where at least half of the students in its elementary, middle, and high schools are below grade level in reading and math. We would hope that addressing these real problems would take precedence over political grandstanding and shameful attacks on our school district’s leaders.
Rep. Jones also misleadingly suggested that our leaders’ promotion of inclusion is to blame for the school system’s declining enrollment. The truth is that it has become too expensive to raise families in our community. Affordable housing and childcare are also worthwhile topics for our lawmakers’ attention.
Our school district and our state are facing so many problems. Many could be alleviated by a state legislature focused on the needs of its citizens – or, at a bare minimum, a legislature that could pass a budget. Instead, Representative Jones and many of his colleagues are choosing to spend their precious time attacking Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools administrators for making available to our kids books like Heather Has Two Mommies, which acknowledge that there are “lots of different kinds of families and the most important thing is that all the people love each other.”
As parents with a real stake in the issues the N.C. General Assembly highlighted in last week’s hearing, we want our lawmakers to know that we value school libraries where everyone can find books with characters like themselves, including kids with two moms or two dads, kids from single-parent families, kids raised by grandparents or foster parents, and LGBTQ+ kids. Stories that include these characters are not teaching sexuality or promoting a particular ideology any more than books that include parents of different genders or boys who like trucks. We’re proud of our schools and our kids. And our kids could teach these lawmakers a lot about kindness and working together to solve problems.
This story was originally published April 28, 2026 at 1:20 PM.