House Oversight Democrats Statement on Hearing
The House Oversight Committee has once again convened in Raleigh to address what the Majority finds to be the most pressing issue facing our state. Not the absence of a budget. Not low teacher pay, public education funding, or any kind of meaningful policy. What urgent priority do they schedule for the very first week of session? A hearing on library books.
Afraid of anything that differs from themselves, the Majority seems determined to make that insecurity everyone else’s problem. Using a phantom list of allegedly LGBT-friendly books they declined to share in advance with Democrats on the committee, but appear to be double-counted book listings, they are now stretching the meaning of the law to fit a hateful political narrative.
Although SB49 plainly addresses classroom instruction, not library books, the Majority is playing Scrabble with the statute to manufacture a controversy, making repeated threats to defund CHCCS over its library books and placing it at odds with longstanding Supreme Court precedent that limits viewpoint-based censorship and state coercion over disfavored books.
And if the Majority wants to talk about what is going wrong in public education, it should look in the mirror: many of the districts struggling most are rural, underfunded, and represented by the very same party now hauling one of the State’s highest-performing districts before this committee. Instead of addressing under-resourced rural school districts, many scoring in the 40s for Grade Level Proficiency, we are back to targeting Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, a district delivering an extremely high Grade Level Proficiency (GLP) score of 70.3%.
Democrats on the Committee reject the Majority’s continued effort to turn library books into a political issue to distract from its own shocking record of misgovernance. It is the constitutional responsibility of the General Assembly to provide a sound, basic education to every child in this State, a job it has utterly failed.
“After more than two years without a budget, which left schools underfunded, state employees and teachers underpaid, and Medicaid on the verge of disaster, House Republican Leadership is focused on hauling in school districts to yell at them,” House Democratic Leader Robert Reives said. “It’s clear to me that Republicans think if they jangle enough culture war trinkets in front of our faces that we will forget about the fact they haven’t done the simple tasks they were elected to do. North Carolinians are smarter than to fall for their distractions.”
“If the Majority wants to talk about following the law, then it should start with the Constitution, including the First Amendment,” said Rep. Maria Cervania. “Certain ideas, and minorities, are being singled out unlawfully in this hearing and we need to apply the law as written, not as the Majority would like it to be.”
“School districts like CHCCS are excelling—it's the rural school districts that are struggling, because Republicans want to give all the money to private schools,” said Rep. Eric Ager. “Perhaps instead of defunding schools or throwing books in the trash, the Majority should start taking education seriously, not treating it like a carnival game.”
