NEW HANOVER COUNTY — The New Hanover County Board of Education’s policy committee painstakingly combed through a list of 25 policies at its Tuesday meeting, but board members are still divided on whether to remove certain terms.
READ MORE: School board members weigh in on Department of Ed’s fate after one shares views on CNN
The policy committee — made up of Republican board members Pete Wildeboer and David Perry, along with Democrat Judy Justice — advanced upward of 10 policies with updated language, removing references to DEI and gender identity, which will now head to the full school board for a final decision.
Justice announced at the beginning of the meeting that she would be voting against all changes to the policies.
“We’ve worked really hard to get to the point where we are today,” Justice said. “This is 2025, not 1965. The Civil Rights Act was in 1964 and a lot of what we’re talking about right now stems from the changes that were needed in the society — badly … everybody in this room is different. I’m looking around at all this diversity you can’t get rid of.”
The moves were prompted by recent executive orders from the Trump administration calling for school districts to stop recognizing the concepts and programming based upon DEI and gender identity.
The committee decided to hold some policies back, however, until it could get clearer answers on the legal implications of including the terms “biological sex” and “sexual orientation.”
Board member David Perry proposed changing several policies to add “biological” before sex, mainly with policies dealing with Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs.
Policy 1310 on parental involvement states the school system does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy and childbirth), disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and age. The proposed amendment would specify biological sex while also adding parental status in the parentheses. It would remove sexual orientation and gender identity.
Board attorney Norwood Blanchard warned against inserting the “biological” qualifier, stating it may become problematic for the board in the future if Title IX guidelines shift to a more expansive view of gender and sex. He added just the word “sex” covered everything Perry was wanting to protect against discrimination, though the Perry disagreed.
“I believe there’s a lot of confusion around language; I think we need to use precise language and not be vague about it, and that’s what we’re talking about,” Perry said. “Biological sex, maybe when this was written, nobody needed to say that. But in today’s world, what is sex? What is gender? I mean, basically, back then, they were generally synonymous terms. No longer.”
The debate over the word came up again in conversation over three Title IX policies — 1720, 4030 and 7235. Blanchard then brought up the legal complexities surrounding Title IX, namely that the Fourth Circuit — to which any lawsuit brought against the school district would belong — differs in its interpretation of Title IX as compared to the Trump administration.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Title IX includes protection for transgender students and that discriminating based on gender identity or sexual orientation constitutes sex discrimination. The Trump administration has issued executive orders against recognizing being transgender and and calling it a form of “gender dysphoria.”
Despite Blanchard saying sexual orientation and gender identity would still be covered under the Fourth Circuit’s interpretation of Title IX, Superintendent Christoper Barnes, disagreed that sex is the same thing as sexual orientation and worried about the lack of specification for protection over sexuality in NHCS policies.
Perry tried to stifle those concerns, noting in reality no one would be discriminating based on sexual orientation.
“My concern is taking it out of the policy says you can,” Barnes said.
Perry pushed back more, noting sexual preference was different from gender identity, in that the latter was something assigned at birth, just as race and ethnicity, while sexual orientation was more of a choice.
Justice said he was wrong and that science supports the conclusion that sexual orientation is determined by a complex array of factors outside of one’s control.
Despite the debate, policy 1310’s amendments were passed by the committee and the same changes were made to policy 5240 (on advertising) and 6220 (school nutrition); however, the trio of Title IX policies will be held in committee for further review of the similar changes.
Several other policy amendments will also be held back — 7360 on addressing crowdfunding inequities, 8220 on gifts and bequests, 9125 on minority-owned business participation, and policies 4329 and 7311 on bullying and harassing behavior.
In addition, several policies that were reviewed will not be changed including 2302, 3000, 4140, 4150, 5010, 5150/5160 and 7100. In a few of these — including policy 3000 on goals and objectives of education programs and policy 4140 on foreign exchange students — the significant change is just to remove the word ‘diversity.’
For example, 4140 states “the board embraces the cultural diversity” that foreign exchange students bring; the amendment would exchange diversity with “perspectives and insights.”
Perry objected to the removal of the word diversity, noting it was used in a different context outside of diversity, equity and inclusion. Both 4140 and 3000 passed without changes. Wildeboer dissented in these votes, though he was successful in exchanging diversity for “heritage” in policy 3200 on selecting instructional materials. To be approved by the board, it now reads “instructional materials should be representative of the rich heritage of our nation and appropriate for the maturity levels and abilities of the students.”
The policy changes follow several moves the board has made to avoid scrutiny — and an alleged withdrawal of federal funding — for potential noncompliance with the Trump administration’s executive orders. Justice pointed out Tuesday, as in prior meetings, the executive orders are undergoing legal challenges.
“We need to start acting like a democracy again,” Justice said. “We need to stick by our Constitution. We need to uphold our laws, and we need to have some pride in that. And if we’re going to be, every day, in classrooms teaching our kids to do that, then we as adults need to start doing it.”
Nonetheless, the school board voted 5-2 last week to combine its two middle school sex education programs and remove lessons on gender and sexuality. The week prior, it voted to remove DEI from its strategic plan in compliance with a “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights mandating districts cease the use of DEI or risk losing federal funding. The executive branch’s authority to pull funding is being challenged, as the Constitution grants most appropriation authority to Congress and federal school funding is bound by law it passed.
Here are the other changes moving forward for board approval:
Policy 3100 on curriculum development
Removes “diversity” from the following sentence: “curriculum development must be an ongoing process in order to address continually the changing needs and diversity of all students and to fulfill the educational goals of the board.”
Policy 3130 on grouping for instruction
Removes the following sentence: “If homogeneous grouping materially affects diversity, the person proposing such grouping must demonstrate that the benefits of homogenous grouping clearly outweigh the benefits of meeting the board’s educational goals of diversity.”
Policy 4303 on fair and consistent discipline
Removes the following sentence: “The board further recognizes that disproportionality (overrepresentation of a particular group of students in relation to their population in a school or across the school system) in exclusionary discipline may sometimes be the result of inconsistent application of discipline to similar offenses and may be a barrier to the board’s overall objective of promoting successful educational outcomes for all students.”
However, the district will still be held to reporting standards and undergo sanctions from the federal government for disproportionality, regardless of whether it recognizes it in policy.
Policy 4310 on integrity and civility
Replaces “cultural diversity and ideological” with “each other” in the following phrase: “students to learn to be responsible for and accept the consequences of their behavior and for all students to respect cultural diversity and ideological”
Policy 7130 on licensure
Deletes the following paragraph: “The superintendent shall assess whether low-income, minority, learning disabled, and/or English learners are being taught by inexperienced, ineffective, or out-of-field teachers at higher rates than students who do not fall into these categories and shall develop a plan to address any such disparities.”
Inserts the following paragraph: “New Hanover County Schools is dedicated to providing an equally high level of quality education in all of our schools, particularly to at-risk students with learning disabilities and academic deficiencies. Therefore, the Superintendent will determine if a disproportionate number of inexperienced, ineffective, or out-of-field teachers are assigned to particular schools (or to at-risk students) and develop a remedial plan to address these concerns.”
Policy 9120 on bidding for construction work
Removes gender identity from the policy, also deletes the following paragraph: “The superintendent, on behalf of the board, must certify that good faith reports have been made to increase the participation in construction contracts by minority-owned and female-owned businesses, as required by policy 9125, Participation by Minority Businesses. The board will grant a North Carolina resident firm providing architectural, engineering, surveying, construction management at-risk service, design-build services, or public-private construction services a preference over a nonresident firm, if the home state of the nonresident firm has a practice of granting a preference to its resident firms over North Carolina resident firms. Any preference granted to a resident firm will be in the same manner, on the same basis, and to the same extent as the preference granted by the nonresident firm’s home state. The school system’s bid documents will require that nonresident firms disclose and describe any construction contract preferences granted by the firm’s home state.”
It is replaced with the following paragraph: “The board will grant a New Hanover County resident firm providing architectural, engineering, surveying, construction management at-risk service, design build-services, or public-private construction services, the highest preference over firms that are not owned and operated within New Hanover County. The board will grant a North Carolina resident f irm providing architectural, engineering, surveying, construction management at-risk service, design build-services, or public-private construction services, the second highest preference over firms that are not owned and operated within North Carolina.”
The board of education will take up review of these policies for a final vote at their next meeting on April 1.
Reach journalist Brenna Flanagan at brenna@localdailymedia.com.
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