The North Carolina Senate passed Senate Bill 49, also known as the Parents’ Bill of Rights with a supermajority vote of 29-18. The bill has gone to the House and has yet to be heard for a vote.

Introduced on Feb. 7, the bill outlines a set of rights parents should have regarding their children’s participation in public schools and the overall curriculum. The provisions include restricting the topics of gender identity, sexuality and sexual activity in kindergarten through fourth grade, giving parents new access to school curriculums, the ability to sit in on a class and requiring school faculty to report requests of name or pronoun changes by students to their parents.

Republican Senator Amy Galey, a primary sponsor of the bill, said it’s intended to present parents with their rights in the educational system and support them in their attempts at being more involved in their children’s school.

“A lot of the time, parents will know or feel like something is supposed to happen, or should happen, but they don’t really know how to make it happen,” Galey said. “This bill is intended to help address that.”

Galey said the restricting of the K-4 curriculum to not include these topics was the result of parental concerns regarding the content being presented to their children, particularly about books including topics such as sex acts.

“I wasn’t present, so I can’t exactly say what [books] they were reading to their students,” Galey said. “Just anecdotally, I’ve heard that parents are feeling that it’s more the sexual activity and sexuality that is being discussed.” 

One of the most vocal opponents to the Parents’ Bill of Rights, Democratic Senator Graig Meyer, said he hasn’t heard any reports about books containing sex acts being read in kindergarten through fourth grade classrooms.

“Usually, the objections that happen in kindergarten through fourth-grade classrooms are objections to books that reference same-sex or same-gender relationships,” Meyer said. “There is no kindergarten teacher in the world that is like, ‘Oh I think we should [read] kindergarteners more sex books.’”

Galey said children should be focusing on learning about things other than gender identity when in kindergarten like cutting with scissors or writing their names.

“A kindergartener doesn’t need to learn about gender identity theory,” Galey said. “We carefully wrote the bill so it would be okay to have sort of good-touch, bad-touch classes because that isn’t necessarily innately sexual. That’s when a teacher should say, ‘You need to ask your parents.’”

Meyer said kindergarteners naturally have these questions and that their teachers are already equipped to answer them.

“Kindergarten teachers are especially attuned to the developmental needs of kindergarteners and kindergartners do have questions about how families are made and how families are made up,” Meyer said. “Teachers have to have a way to answer that when it comes up in class. But the way that you answer that is not the way that you do when you’re in fifth grade. … You try and give kindergarteners the minimum amount of information that you can to answer their questioning mind and leave the rest of it for a later developmental stage or for their family to take care of.”

Natalie Bullock Brown, an assistant teaching professor from the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies program at NC State, said not every kid has a parent they can talk to about their own gender identity, and school teachers and counselors play a major role in their development.

“I feel that it is critical that I am at least one person that [her children] can come to me and feel safe,” Bullock Brown said. “Not every kid has that right. Not every kid has a parent that feels that way. I think it’s a dire situation when counselors are basically mandated to betray the young people that they’re supposed to serve.”

Meyer said students shouldn’t have to rely on their parents to answer all of their questions in the first place.

“Senator Galey assumes that those kids have parents … and those kids who do have active parents [might not be] any better at talking about these issues than a professional educator,” Meyer said.

Galey did not provide a definition of what gender identity was, nor does the bill explicitly define it as a term. The only mention of gender identity in the bill is the prohibition of it in the curriculum. Meyer said he was disappointed Galey and the bill couldn’t define what gender identity was.

“[It’s] upsetting if somebody is introducing and passing legislation and they can’t describe what it is that’s in it,” Meyer said.

Meyer said the bill’s lack of clarity was one of his biggest concerns and that even with an exception of parental notification in cases of abuse or neglect, it forces teachers to lean towards notifying.

“The bill itself, making it a law, indicates that the bias should be towards telling [parents], not towards protecting child’s safety, and I think you should protect [children’s] safety,“ Meyer said.

One of the most controversial provisions of the bill requires school personnel to notify parents when their children request a change in name. Galey said this only applies to official record requests, and not between individuals for a child’s preferred name. 

“Under this bill, [a child] can put in his PowerSchool preferred name … nobody has to call his parents,” Galey said. “We heard in committee, a child wanted to be called Cloud, so they can put that in their PowerSchool … nobody has to call the parents.”

In Wake County, however, a parent’s signature is required for a preferred name change in PowerSchool as well as for the official record changes Galey mentioned. Galey said a child’s pronouns, though, should not be unknown to the parents and that they should be notified if a child requests to be referred to differently at school. 

“Pronouns, under the bill, would require that the parents be notified that the child has asked that their pronouns be changed,” Galey said. “We shouldn’t have one life at school and another at home.” 

A notification would not just be required for requests between a student and a teacher, but also for school counselors who previously had confidentiality with exceptions for harm or violence. This is due to the language of the bill defining school personnel as any “employee of a public school unit.”

Bullock Brown said the bill is a clear statement that children’s needs are not important to lawmakers.

“I think it’s saying, without saying it, that what you care about is not really that important,” Bullock Brown said. “These ideologies are more important than you are and what you’re struggling with. [The LGBTQ Community] is watching, you know. It’s not like they don’t see the way that [Republicans] are trying to strip away rights.” 

The bill has yet to be put for a vote in the House. Currently, State Republicans need just one Democrat vote in the House to override Gov. Cooper’s veto and pass the bill with a supermajority.