North Carolina’s adoption of the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” law has led to school-based policies and practices that discriminate against LGBTQ students, the Campaign for Southern Equality (CSE) alleges in a against the State Board of Education and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

The complaint was filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division on Tuesday. It contends that the state’s public schools are “systematically marginalizing” LGBTQ students with the mandates included in Senate Bill 49. The law requires educators to alert parents if their child changes their name or pronoun at school. It also restricts instruction about gender identity and sexuality in K-4 classrooms.

“Under the leadership of the North Carolina State Board of Education and the Department of Public Instruction, local school districts are barring LGBTQ-affirming content, outing transgender students, erecting barriers to LGBTQ students receiving needed health care at school as well as support from educators and prohibiting transgender girls from playing athletics consistent with their gender identity,” CSE wrote in its complaint on behalf of LGBTQ students.

The complaint is critical of Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson for making what CSE contends are “homophobic and transphobic” remarks. The complaint shares several Robinson quotes about homosexuality including in which he said: “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth.”

CSE is also critical of State Superintendent Catherine Truitt for her support of SB 49 and House Bill 574, the so-called “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” which restricts transgender females from playing middle school, high school and college sports.

“While she [Truitt] avoids ranting about “filth,” she agrees with the Lieutenant Governor [Robinson] that transgender people do not really exist,” the complaint states. “ She consistently refers to transgender women as “biological males” and speaks consistently of “gender preference.”

CSE asked federal officials to protect students.

“SBE’s and DPI’s implementation of SB 49 and HB 574 is discriminating against LGBTQ students in North Carolina,” the complaint states. “This discrimination has created a hostile educational environment that harms LGBTQ students on a daily basis and, in so doing, violates Title IX.”

Educators have been left in an impossible position due to SB 49 mandates and a lack of guidance from the state education leaders about how to implement them, the complaint said.

“They [educators] must choose between, on the one hand, following state leaders’ orders or, on the other hand, federal and state legal obligations as well as their professional obligations to their students,” the complaint states.

NCDPI spokeswoman Blair Rhoades told NC Newsline in December that the department provided information about SB 49 to more than 350 participants via a webinar. Rhoades  the department has provide for guidance with the lengthy title: “Parents Guide to Student Achievement (PSGA) Considerations from NCDPI: Based on Parents’ Bill of Rights – SB49; Session Law 2023-106.”

Meanwhile, the complaint included dozens of testimonials from students, parents, educators and other who shared stories about how the mandates are harming students by forcing LGBTQ students back into the closet and preventing them from receiving supportive services.

One high school student reported: “I personally have a supportive family who has put my preferred name in PowerSchool, but my friends are no longer feeling safe going by their preferred name and pronouns because they’re afraid that they will be outed to their families who are not supportive. These friends are scared for their safety and well-being.”

Democratic critics of the law complained that the legislation would have a chilling effect on student and teacher relationships at a time when student mental health is a top concern. But Republican supporters said it grew out of parental concerns about school curriculum parents saw when children were learning from home during the pandemic.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro School member Mike Sharp said SB 49 needs more work.

“I think a logical next step then would be to send this back to the policy committee with a clear directive from us that says: take out the parts of this that are harmful to children, rewrite it, ignore whether you’re breaking SB 49,” Sharp said in testimonials shared by CSE.

Last week, Sharp’s board declined to create a procedure to alert parents before allowing a student to use a different name or pronoun at school. It also declined to prohibit instruction about gender identity and sexuality in K-4 classrooms.

Truitt said there could be consequences for not following the law.

“No. Sorry. You may not break the laws you don’t like – even in Chapel Hill. I worked with the legislature to pass the Parents Bill of Rights to protect children and empower parents and it’s unacceptable for Chapel Hill or anyone else to ignore it,” Truitt tweeted last week.

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In a series of four November 2020 emails to Board of Trustees member Kelly Hopkins, two of which spanned a dozen paragraphs or more, Hussman argued that Hannah-Jones’s telling of the American story over-emphasized the role of slavery and warned that her stance on reparations would be “detrimental” to the university, describing Hannah-Jones’s views as “controversial, contentious, and divisive.”

“I do not dispute [Hannah-Jones] having her convictions in favor of reparations, nor do I dispute her right to advocate for it as strongly as possible,” Hussman wrote. “But I believe giving her a platform to argue for this as a tenured professor in the journalism school will not be beneficial, but instead detrimental, to the school.”

“No one knows exactly what she will say in the future,” he continued. “She could be fired from the New York Times. But as I understand it, she could not be fired as a tenured professor.”

Hussman, whose name adorns the UNC school of journalism thanks to a $25 million pledge in 2019, the balance of which has yet to be delivered, first shared his concerns with David Routh, UNC-Chapel Hill’s senior development officer in September. Emails indicate that board members Chuck Duckett, Jeff Brown and Richard Stevens were also made aware of the donor’s appeal, in addition to Kelly Hopkins. All four trustees have since left the board after .

Hannah-Jones would have been the first Black Knight Chair since the position was founded at UNC.

����Ӱ�� received the internal emails July 30 after filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the university, as did several other media organizations, which have also reported on the communications.

In another message that included annotations of passages from an 1856 Abraham Lincoln speech, Hussman argued that Hannah-Jones’s , a collection of essays from the New York Times Magazine that relates the country’s founding and development through the experiences of Black Americans and earned the journalist a Pulitzer Prize, overstated the role that slavery played in the American Revolution.

“The country may have committed its original sin,” Hussman wrote, “but it was not what the founders or the colonies were intending at that time, in 1776.”

“I thought to myself, who are you going to believe: Abraham Lincoln or Nikole Hannah Jones?”

In 2020, the New York Times to an essay from The 1619 Project, changing a line to clarify that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motivation for some, not all, colonists during the American Revolution.

In June, Hussman told NC Policy Watch that he , and that the balance of his donation was not dependent on their decision. He did not respond to requests from ����Ӱ�� asking him to explain his intentions in sending the November emails.

Text messages also indicate that Hussman and Hopkins frequently spoke on the phone through the fall and winter of 2020, and the spring of 2021.

After Hussman sent the series of four email messages, the Board of Trustees, which normally rubber stamps tenure recommendations already endorsed by the faculty, twice delayed Hannah-Jones’s tenure vote, once in November and once in January. In the latter instance, the deferral was due in part to , according to reporting from the News & Observer. In February, the university offered Hannah-Jones a five-year contract, breaking the precedent of offering tenure packages to previous Knight Chairs.

In late June, following widespread protests amid reports that North Carolina’s flagship university had , the university reversed course. The board June 30.

After initially accepting the university’s five-year offer, Hannah-Jones, a 2017 recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, reconsidered when it became clear that her tenure process had been marred by what she called “political interference.” The 1619 Project creator eventually , instead joining the faculty of historically BlackHoward University, alongside author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Hannah-Jones, an alumna of UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism school, did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s requests for comment.

“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me,” Hannah-Jones wrote in an early July published through the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented her.

Her new initiative at Howard, the Center for Journalism and Democracy, “will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the perilous challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor, and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism,” she said.

Details on Hussman’s emails below: