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The Wake County school system is bracing for a potential spike in the number of challenges objecting to the instructional materials used by teachers in its 204 schools.
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This week, the Wake school board updated its policy for handling challenges to instructional materials and supplementary materials to comply with changes made by state lawmakers. Legislators created a new review process for school districts that expands who can challenge materials and requires quick turnaround times to objections.
“This is bad legislation again baked into the state budget,” school board member Lynn Edmonds said before Tuesday’s vote. “It undermines the professionalism of our educators, including our highly qualified team that evaluates and selects instructional materials.”
Here’s a look at how the new challenge process will work in North Carolina’s largest school district.
Under Wake’s old policy, challenges could only be filed by parents of students for materials used at their child’s school.
State lawmakers said challenges can now be filed by parents of students in a school district, teachers in the district or any residents in that district. The expansion of challenges to non-parents drew complaints from some Wake school board members.
Wake will require people to submit proof that they live in the county. Examples of acceptable documents cited by administrators could include a utility bill, driver’s license or a voter registration card.
Wake says it will post on its website (wcpss.net) a digital form that people can use to file challenges.
Challenges can be made for one or more of three reasons:
Legislators are requiring school districts to form a community media advisory committee to do the initial review of all challenges. Lawmakers say the committee has to include principals, teachers, parents and school media coordinators.
The new committee will replace the instructional materials review committees that Wake had been using.
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Legislators are requiring the community media advisory committees to hold a hearing within two weeks of receiving a challenge. Administrators plan to have Wake’s committee meet weekly.
The committee meetings are public and are expected to be held virtually.
The committee has two weeks from the hearing to make a recommendation to the school board. The school board is required to make a decision on the challenge at the next meeting after it gets the committee recommendation.
The school board’s decision is final.
Wake is interpreting recent changes in state law to mean people can no longer file challenges against books in school libraries. Wake says parents are allowed to restrict what their children can borrow but not what’s available for other students in the library.
Wake will only review challenges to school library books if they’re being used by a teacher in class for instruction.
The school board voted 6-1 to approve the changes to comply with state law.
Even though Edmonds voted for the changes, she complained that it will take up valuable staff time. At her request, Wake will report how much time staff spend on dealing with the challenges.
“The directives in this state mandate require a lot of extra time of educators to respond to the whims of random critics, not just parents or guardians of students,” Edmonds said. “We need to trust our educators and respect their time and this legislation flies in the face of that.”
The change in how Wake is handling library book challenges is the one thing that most board members like. But the change is one of the reasons that board member Cheryl Caulfield was the lone no vote on the revisions.
Caulfield also criticized Wake for requiring parents to list the ISBN number for books if they don’t want their children to check them out from a teacher’s classroom library. Administrators say the content for a book can change with each edition and ISBN, but Caulfield said the requirement will limit parental flexibility.
“If they don’t want their child reading books from a certain author, why can’t they say that?” Caulfield said.
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This story was originally published September 18, 2026 at 5:45 AM.