Lawyers for Middle Creek Parental Rights gave WCPSS fifteen days. What the letter says.

A disclosure before anything else: this is about our own letter. Middle Creek Parental Rights is the client. The Thomas More Society sent it on behalf of this organisation and of named parents at the school, and we are reporting on it as a party to it, not as an observer of it.

On 15 September the firm wrote to the WCPSS superintendent, the southern area superintendent, the principal of Middle Creek Elementary and the chairman of the Wake County Board of Education. The letter runs eight pages, sets out five demands, and says suit will follow if written assurances are not given within fifteen days. That deadline falls on 30 September.

It is not a lawsuit

Coverage has described the district as facing a lawsuit. Nothing has been filed. This is a demand letter with a deadline attached, and the difference is not cosmetic: a filed complaint is a public court record with a case number, and this is correspondence between lawyers. Breitbart’s headline says the district “faces lawsuit”; its own first sentence says the district faces one if parents are not allowed to opt out. The first sentence is the accurate one.

If the fifteen days pass without written assurances, a complaint may follow. If it does, there will be a case number and a court, and we will report those rather than the prospect of them.

What the letter actually demands

Five things, in its own words, all framed as written assurances:

• The right for parents to opt their children out of any class taught by the music teacher at issue, with an alternative class or release from campus for religious instruction.
• That no student be disciplined for not using the teacher’s preferred pronouns and courtesy titles.
• That sexuality and gender identity not be discussed at Middle Creek by faculty or staff except as state law allows, with prior parental notice and a right to opt out.
• That the music teacher not be permitted to occupy any restroom, locker room or similar space at the same time as any student.
• That no employee retaliate against a student who opts out, uses male pronouns for the teacher, or otherwise invokes these rights.

Worth noting because some coverage has inverted it: the second demand is that students not be disciplined for not using the teacher’s preferred pronouns. WRAL’s account has it the other way round.

What the letter expressly disclaims

This is the part most of the coverage has left out, and it is the part that matters most for what this organisation is understood to be asking for.

To be clear, this dispute does not concern whether WCPSS is obliged to make its employment decisions without consideration of sexual orientation or gender identity. Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020), establishes the school district’s duties under Title VII in this regard. Nor are we asking that this teacher’s employment be terminated or otherwise adversely affected. Suggestions to the contrary are wholly false and misleading.

That is our counsel, in writing, saying the ask is not the teacher’s job. It is consistent with what this site has said throughout, and anyone characterising the letter as an attempt to get someone fired can now be pointed at the paragraph.

We should be equally straight about the other direction. Two of the five demands do concern this particular employee — how students may address them, and which rooms they may be in at the same time as a student. Those are narrower than termination, but they are not nothing, and a reader who notices that before we admit it has reason to trust us less.

What it relies on

The letter’s argument runs on Mahmoud v. Taylor and Mirabelli v. Bonta, on North Carolina’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, and on the Free Exercise and free-speech lines of cases. It also invokes N.C. Gen. Stat. § 115C-76.55, the K–4 instruction limit this site has written about at length.

One caution, because we would apply it to anyone else’s brief. The letter says Mahmoud “struck down a public school policy”. The holding we read in the slip opinion is narrower — that the parents were entitled to a preliminary injunction. That is a meaningful win and it is not the same sentence. Our guide to the K–4 instruction rules sets out what the statute itself says, which is the part a parent can actually cite to a principal.

We have not independently checked every citation in the letter, and we are not restating its legal conclusions as this site’s own. A demand letter is an advocate’s document. That is what it is for.

What the district has said

WCPSS did not immediately respond to WRAL’s request for comment. The district has pointed to its hiring and employment policies, which include nondiscrimination clauses covering gender identity — the board amended those years ago following the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock.

On the substance of the five demands, the district has not publicly said whether it will agree to any of them. We have not sought comment ourselves, and given that we are the client here, the district’s answer will properly go to our counsel rather than to us.

What we are not publishing

The parents named in the letter are redacted in the public version, and we are not naming them. We are also not hosting a copy of the letter. The published PDF is redacted, but we could not confirm that the redaction removed the underlying text rather than covering it, and republishing a document that might still carry our own members’ names is not a risk worth taking to save a click. We link the firm’s copy instead.

We continue not to name the teacher. WRAL, the newsroom closest to this, has declined to, and the letter itself does not name them either.

What happens next

• 30 September — the fifteen days run out.
• If written assurances come, there is no suit, and the assurances themselves become the document worth reading.
• If a complaint is filed, it will carry a case number and a court, and that record supersedes every characterisation of it, including ours.

We will report whichever happens, and we will say plainly that we are a party to it.