Keep grown-ups’ pronoun fights out of grade school classrooms

In the 1990 movie “ Kindergarten Cop ,” it is a five-year-old boy, not Arnold Schwarzenegger, who blurts out the actual biology lesson: “Boys have a penis, girls have a vagina.”

Schwarzenegger’s character, an undercover detective drafted into substitute teaching, doesn’t linger on the matter or turn it into a discussion. Rather, he offers a dry, one-line brush-off and moves the class along. Even a Hollywood tough guy playing a novice teacher can tell that topic isn’t his to raise with a room of five-year-olds.

That instinct — an adult sensing the conversation was above the room’s maturity level and shutting it down rather than encouraging it — is exactly what a school board in Wake County, North Carolina, forgot this summer.

I have coached youth track, football, and rugby for years and raised three boys of my own. I know how a five-year-old processes the world — literally, and through whatever script the adult in the room hands him. That is not a knock on any teacher’s character. It is a fact about child development that North Carolina’s legislature has conveniently written into law.

The problem is the gap between the statute on the books and the practice in the classroom. Middle Creek Elementary in Apex hired a new music teacher, previously known by his male name, who now goes by Aria Derrick and asks students to use “she” and “Miss.” Parents learned of the arrangement not from a letter home but from photos at a PTA luncheon.

The class is mandatory. There is no opt-out. When parent Aaron Driver and the group Middle Creek Parental Rights raised the issue at board meetings this month, some board members defended the hire. At least one commenter told objecting families that homeschooling was the option if they wanted to “keep the bigots away.” State Rep. Erin Pare (R), who floated a sex-based dress code for staff after hearing from constituents, has reported receiving death threats for raising the question.

The News and Observer and other outlets covered the subsequent board meetings. Speakers split between those demanding parental notice and an alternative class and those defending the teacher as qualified and “a lovely person.” Children, according to parents who spoke, have come home upset, confused, and asking questions about sex and gender presentation they had not raised before. That is the point of the complaint.

North Carolina’s 2023 Parents’ Bill of Rights is unambiguous. Instruction on gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality cannot be lawfully included in the curriculum provided in kindergarten through fourth grade , regardless of whether the information comes from school personnel or third parties.

But the statute contains one carve-out: Teachers may still respond to a child’s unsolicited question. That carve-out is where this fight lives. Ask a kindergartner to address an adult male as “Miss” instead of “Mister,” and you have manufactured the unsolicited question the law was written to avoid. The statute did its job on paper, but the rollout gutted it in practice.

Wake County is not an outlier. In Dorchester County, South Carolina, 19 families discovered their fourth-grade teacher was transitioning only after a student greeted the teacher as “Ma’am” and was corrected on the spot. When parents asked to move their children to a different classroom, the superintendent refused, citing full rosters and fairness to other families. Fairness to whom was never explained to the parents, who wanted a heads-up before enrollment, not a debate about gender ideology after the fact.

The dress-code fight proposal that followed only proves how badly some districts misread their own problem. A state representative floated a rule requiring school staff to dress consistent with their biological sex. Board members correctly noted that enforcing gender-stereotyped clothing rules on adults runs into real constitutional trouble under existing case law.

That vote, however, let the district dodge the real issue. Parents were not asking the school to police an adult’s wardrobe. They were asking for a courtesy phone call before their five-year-old came home asking why the teacher used to be called something else. A district that wins the legal argument on the wrong question still loses the parents.

To be fair, the teacher at Middle Creek did not ask for a national headline. Nothing in the public record suggests there has been any misconduct toward a child. Professionals deserve to do their jobs without a mob outside the building. I would say the same if the roles were reversed.

The complaint parents are raising is not about the teacher’s private life. It is about notice, consent, and a required class for five-year-olds with zero opt-out. A district can respect an employee’s identity and still owe families a heads-up before enrollment. Those two things are not in tension. By pretending they are, the school board turns a notification failure into a national culture-war story.

And elementary school has only one job: reading, writing, and arithmetic, taught by qualified adults who show up prepared. High school is where teenagers begin wrestling with sexuality and harder questions about human nature. Kindergarten is not a seminar room. Every parent who dropped a five-year-old off at Middle Creek this August thought they were signing up for phonics and multiplication tables, not a referendum on gender theory.

I have watched boys and girls on the track and on the rugby pitch learn hard lessons about effort, failure, and getting back up. Those lessons stick because the adults in charge keep the focus on the work in front of them, not on adult debates the children cannot yet process.

The same standard applies in the classroom. Give families what they signed up for. Enforce the statute as written. Notify parents before the school year begins, not after the questions start at the dinner table. Build in the opt-out lawmakers that already assumed would exist for any subject this sensitive.

None of that requires people to hide who they are. Also, none of it required a pastor to lecture a room full of parents that their concerns were manufactured. Just save the graduate seminar for when the kids are actually old enough to enroll in it.

Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management.