Sunday Edition: Seed Money; On Book Bans and Parents' Rights

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On Wednesday morning, I drove over to Creekwood to have coffee with Sonya Muldrow and Dan Winslow, president and CEO of The Endowment (you may have heard of it). Muldrow asked for the meeting so she could pitch her idea for a community garden in the housing authority neighborhood.

Winslow brought The Endowment’s new vice president of external affairs (kind of a government liaison) Tyler Newman and Community Advisory Council member Jamar Jenkins. Muldrow invited her friend, Deshuanna Simpson, currently starting up a professional catering business, David Brenner, an advocate for urban gardens, and me.

I met Muldrow four years ago, when she was displaced from her residence, along with dozens of other families, by the mold crisis that nearly bankrupted the Wilmington Housing Authority. Muldrow’s a green thumb and a certified master gardener, and when we interviewed her back in 2021 she was visiting her raised garden beds – which were sprouting garlic greens at the time – to check on them.

Since then, Muldrow has founded a non-profit, BAP’S Community Garden (BAPS is a tribute to her late mother, Barbara Anna Pearl). Her goal is to take over a fallow lot in Creekwood and turn it into an urban gardening collective. Muldrow felt Creekwood, which sits smack in the middle of a food desert, was a good spot to tackle food insecurity, but also an important place to educate people on healthy diets and foster community.

Muldrow’s charismatic and outspoken, and we’ve stayed in touch since the mold crisis reporting. So when she told me earlier this spring that she’d called a meeting with Winslow and asked if I’d come along to see how it went, I said yes.

I got there a few minutes early; Muldrow’s apartment was immaculate, and she’d laid out breakfast snacks and had coffee and bottled water ready to go – the kind of stuff The Endowment usually offers guests, except in her living room and not a downtown office

If Winslow was surprised to see me, he wasn’t much shaken by it. (He did ask if the meeting would be off the record or on – we agreed on the latter.)

“When I started this job, I said that we’ll meet anybody, anywhere, anytime – we’ll meet people in their living room, on the front porch,” Winslow said as we settled in. “This is not our first living room meeting.”

We joined hands while Muldrow said the Lord’s Prayer (I promised not to burst into flames).

Then we took our seats and listened to a presentation from Brenner, a retired engineer and Muldrow’s fellow master gardener, who has been described as the “Mr. Rogers of gardening.” Brenner’s quite a character himself, and handily unpacked the history of race, segregation, and inequality in Wilmington from 1898 to today – and made the case for a community garden to address some of those persistent problems. (Winslow has told me he’s had essentially an immersive crash course in the 1898 coup and massacre since taking the job last fall. I’m sure he’s heard many renditions of it, but he didn’t disengage.)

But Brenner was really just there to tee things up for Muldrow, who spoke about her desire to promote “healthy diets” but also “healthy relationships” in Creekwood. She talked about working with the Creekwood Learning Center’s after-school programs and setting up garden planters around her neighborhood as part of a collaboration with the New Hanover County branch of the NC Cooperative Extension.

“You know, planting dirt is very therapeutic. I found that out when I was getting [the garden] together and I had the kids here,” Muldrow said. “I even have a couple of gang members interested. I did not know that a few of them, while they were incarcerated, got their license for horticulture.”

This year, Muldrow applied for one of The Endowment’s smaller community and capacity grants – which provide up to $5,000 in funding for smaller projects and newer nonprofits – to help acquire supplies and equipment. She’s gotten tentative permission from the Wilmington Housing Authority to use land to consolidate the garden beds which are currently scattered throughout Creekwood. She has bigger ambitions, including a fruit forest (think apple and citrus trees lining the streets of Creekwood), which will require more funding down the road, but hopes an initial grant from The Endowment will get the ball rolling.

Muldrow took us on a tour of the land where she wanted to build her garden, waving and greeting neighbors as we walked. Winslow mostly listened as she pointed to places where she’d like to see fruit trees, gardening storage, and the growing beds themselves. Newman did some due diligence, checking GIS maps on his phone to make sure Muldrow’s exuberance didn’t spill across property lines.

Muldrow and Winslow wandered into the shade while Newman, Brenner, and I joked about fresh transplants from up north who are about to experience their first summer of Wilmington heat and humidity (yes, I’m a Yankee, but I’ve had many years to acclimate). After about ten minutes, a thunderhead announced itself and we double-timed it back to Muldrow’s place.

On the way back, Muldrow plugged her friend’s catering business – The Endowment has a policy of using diverse businesses for catering and other services – and asked Winslow what he thought of her proposal.

“So, Mr. Winslow, what do you think? Talk to Ben,” Muldrow said, smiling at me.

“Who, Ben? I don’t talk to that guy – my communication people get mad at me when I talk to Ben,” Winslow said. (Jokingly, or mostly jokingly, I think.)

I said that, personally, I loved the idea of the community garden grant. My wife and I plant a porch garden every year, and I agree with Muldrow and Brenner about its many benefits. I also know The Endowment could sneeze out $5,000 by accident while granting tens of millions of dollars annually – so Muldrow’s ask seems reasonable, in my opinion.

So what did Winslow think? Well, the Endowment is still reviewing the inaugural batch of $5,000 capacity and community grants, with recipients set to be announced next month. Winslow didn’t give away anything specific, but he did say, “We consider food insecurity in the category of basic needs – so, anything else you wanna do, doesn’t matter if people are hungry, right? So you gotta try and address basic needs.”

As it started to rain, we got in our cars and left Creekwood. I headed to the station, Winslow and his team to their next meeting, I presume. I think everyone felt pretty good – and why not? I’d say the meeting went pretty well.

But, at the risk of spoiling the mood, I’ll say this, too: with the City of Wilmington and New Hanover County both looking to tighten their belts, and the Trump Administration freezing and canceling federal grants left and right, The Endowment is increasingly the only game in town. Front porch meetings and coffee chats are great – truly, refreshing and laudable – but times are tough and trending tougher.

Will Sonya Muldrow get her community garden? Or at least some entry-level funding? We’ll know soon enough. As I said, The Endowment could find enough spare change in the couch to support her. But the underlying reasons she wants to build that garden in the first place, the driving force behind dozens (if not hundreds) of nonprofits trying to move the needle just a tiny bit, that’s the real story.

Benjamin Schachtman

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WHQR

Recently, we ran a story on a Wrightsboro Elementary parent’s request to ban a book.

The book was Blended, by Sharon Draper, a story about a multiracial child of divorce that includes scenes of racial harassment and, ultimately, a racially-charged traffic stop that ends with the child being accidentally shot and wounded by a police officer.

The parent was Josie Barnhart, a Republican member of the New Hanover County Board of Education – although we didn’t know that when we first started looking into the story in April, and we weren’t completely sure when we published the story. All of the documentation associated with the challenge had redacted the parent's name, citing FERPA, the federal law protecting student privacy. As we noted in our reporting, that’s a distinct difference from the 2022-2023 process of banning Stamped, where New Hanover County Schools turned over documents including the name and email address of Katie Gates, who was pushing to have the book removed from her daughter’s class (and, later, the district as a whole).

What we did know at the time was relatively limited: Blended was not in the main library and wasn’t being taught in any classes, but at least one copy was on a classroom bookshelf (part of the collection curated by individual teachers). The parent took issue with the book and challenged it, asking it to be removed. A school-level review committee rejected the challenge, saying the book was appropriate. The parent appealed to a district-level committee, this time asking for the book to be removed, not only from Wrightsboro, but from all NHCS libraries.

On Monday, May 5, that committee met, but NHCS wouldn’t tell us what the decision was. That week, as my colleague Rachel Keith and I reported out the story, several sources—who asked to remain anonymous—suggested the parent was, in fact, Barnhart. On Wednesday, May 7, we asked Barnhart directly if she’d filed the book challenge, and she gave us a non-answer, suggesting we filed a public records request (which we had already done). We followed up, again directly asking her to confirm or deny pursuing a ban of Blended. She didn’t respond.

By the afternoon of Friday, May 9, NHCS still hadn’t responded to multiple requests for the district-level committee’s decision, and Barnhart still hadn’t responded to our follow-up. Feeling like we'd given everyone a fair amount of time to get back to us, we published. We included Barnhart’s non-answer and noted that we were prompted to ask her by sources who had asked to stay anonymous — because otherwise, it would seem quite odd that we would specifically ask Barnhart out of the blue about the complaint.

On Wednesday, Barnhart posted a response to the story on social media (and also as an opinion piece on The Wilmington Conservative). She acknowledged she had filed the complaint, saying she began the process six months ago after the book was specifically given to her child. She strongly criticized anyone who had anything to do with her name being leaked to the press.

She objected to what she saw as a politicized leak of her personal information – that is, by the sources who reached out to us – and said she felt it was aimed at muzzling her rights as a parent. She later went on The Nick Craig Show to articulate more of her concerns, including that she had been targeted specifically because she is a Republican, and that the leak (and by extension our reporting) would have a chilling effect on parental rights. She lamented that the incident had turned her kids into collateral, and noted that “people asked when I first ran, why don't more people with kids serve on the school board? This is the why.”

Not surprisingly, there was a lot of conversation about this, including in the comment section of a Port City Daily article about Barnhart’s statement.

While I haven’t tracked down every comment and criticism, there are some broad strokes I want to address here – including what I think are some legitimate questions and concerns about how we reported this story out. (I’m omitting criticism of the book itself because that’s not the point here. Barnhart has every right as a parent to find a book inappropriate, whether it’s Blended or Hatchet or My Brother Sam is Dead, but we’re concerned with the process, transparency, and accountability.)

I also reached out to Barnhart directly by text message about the situation. We had a very civil back-and-forth, and she did say she would consider answering some questions about her point of view as a parent on this issue. Due to scheduling conflicts, she wasn’t available for an in-studio conversation on short notice, but I do hope we’ll be able to arrange that in the future. There’s a lot to unpack about this situation and, certainly, the reporting from the last week and this newsletter won’t cover it all.

Anonymous sources — I got a few complaints about our use of anonymous sources here. One conservative put it bluntly, “anonymous sources are sloppy and you know it. It’s sloppy terrible journalism.”

As I’ve written in this newsletter, I myself have many concerns about modern journalism's overdependence on anonymous sources. Doing it for a scoop – as with predictions that Democrat Roy Cooper would be named Kamala Harris’ running mate – or to anchor a story with no on-record sources or documents is reckless in my opinion.

But it’s a different thing when you use anonymous sources and then vet and report out what they’ve said. Or, as was the case in this story, where you’re being transparent about why you’re asking certain questions. You still have to verify your sources and weigh their interests against the public benefit, which our newsroom does every time we use an anonymous source.

I’ll say, that the critique of anonymous sources is often highly politicized. When I’ve mentioned anonymous sources in my reporting on the Wilmington Police Department, for example, I’ve been criticized by the left. In this case, it’s criticism from the right. So, while I fully acknowledge that anonymous sources should be used judiciously and only when necessary, I’ve also seen that complaints about the sourcing is often really about the content of the reporting.

Sources do vary wildly in quality and motivation. Some are just wingnuts, sending you cryptic emails with hackneyed calls to “follow the money!” and claims that some scandal “goes all the way to the top.” (Yes, we really get messages like that.) But others are sensitive, cautious, and earnestly concerned about the truth and the public.

Framing book challenges as ‘banning’ — We know it’s become a conservative talking point to contest the use of the word ‘ban’ – but when you remove something broadly from an institution or general use, that is a ban. Liberals and conservatives alike try to ban things all the time, and rebranding ‘ban’ as anything else won’t change that. Should we ban ‘banned’ and use differently allowed instead? No, I don’t think so. We’ll keep calling that spade a spade.

Targeting Republicans — During her appearance on The Nick Craig Show, Barnhart said she felt her identity had been revealed specifically because she was a Republican, and that the media had piled on.

“They even quoted me as the Republican school board member. And so to throw that in there, that was nothing to do with the complaint that I brought up,” she told Nick Craig, adding that she didn’t know if the local GOP has any policy position on the book.

I’ll say, it’s pretty standard practice to identify elected officials by their party affiliation. Even with a firewall between Barnhart’s personal and public life, it would still be disingenuous of us not to note that she’s a school board member.

More broadly though, conservatives have asked me to do the thought experiment: if it was a Democratic school board member, would anyone who caught wind of it leak it to the press? It’s hard to imagine Democrats Judy Justice or Tim Merrick pushing for a book ban, but, let’s take the steelman version of this thought experiment: would sources ever leak something about a liberal or Democratic official? Short answer: yes. They absolutely would and do all the time, in the schools, in the city and county, in the police department, the district attorney’s and sheriff’s office. Hell, it happens at CFPUA.

Parental Privacy — It’s been suggested that Barnhart’s privacy should have been protected by federal law. That is the opinion of the NHCS attorneys, who – with all due respect – have given us some unconvincing and at times inaccurate defenses of that reading (including claiming that email correspondence with Katie Gates was initially redacted – it wasn’t). Other attorneys we’ve spoken to feel quite differently about this situation. In addition to the example of Gates, we’ve also seen other parent complaints, including one from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, that redacted the student's name but not the parent’s. So, we respectfully disagree with NHCS’ reading of FERPA, but ultimately it seems only the courts would give us a straight answer.

More generally, Barnhart and others have suggested that the sources who reached out to us, and our subsequent reporting, threaten to silence parents who are exercising their legal rights to contest material in the schools.

"If they are willing to do this to me," Barnhart wrote in her statement, "who is next?”

I’ve seen plenty of others suggesting that the liberal media wants to dox parents just for sticking up for their kids. And, in our current hyper-politicized moment, I can honestly see what some parents might feel that way

So, let me say our interest in this story was only piqued when it became a request for a district-wide ban. In my editorial opinion, there is no journalistic value in what curriculum changes parents request for their own students. Even a parent who asked for a book to be removed from their child’s classroom would not likely warrant news coverage for us, although certainly other parents might feel upset.

But at a certain point, the parent’s actions have consequences far beyond their own family, and it becomes notable. It’s also increasingly difficult to suggest that FERPA applies. If the correspondence or complaint concerns removing a book from the whole district, that doesn’t seem to specifically identify a child. In general, the question is: how much influence should a parent be able to wield incognito, so to speak? Should a book be banned across the district based on a single anonymous complaint?

It’s also worth noting that the school board hearings to consider banning Stamped essentially put the book on trial, with Gates in the role of prosecutor and Superintendent Dr. Charles Foust and Assistant Superintendent Dawn Brinson defending the book. Gates made an opening statement and testified during the five-hour hearing. Whatever you think of her arguments, you have to admit she had the courage of her convictions.

What would that have looked like with Barnhart? Would she step away from the dais as a board member and take the podium to prosecute Blended? Or would the board have to restructure the process to preserve her anonymity? And, in that case, would she recuse herself or just conveniently miss that meeting?

So, when an elected official attempts to change school policy as a parent, there’s a genuinely open question: how should the district handle this?

For example, we now know that the district-level committee voted to take no action on Barnhart’s appeal – meaning Blended could stay where it was – but Superintendent Dr. Christopher Barnes intervened. Barnes overruled the district-level committee, removing the book from classrooms and allowing it in elementary school libraries but restricting it to fourth and fifth graders and requiring parental permission for students to check it out.

“Although it is rare, it is within my purview to revise the recommendation of the MTAC committee, and that is what I have chosen to do in this instance. This revision I think is most in line with the Parent Bill of Rights and existing and potential forthcoming legislation,” Barnes noted in his decision, released in a memo on Tuesday, May 13, the day before Barnhart’s statement.

On social media, there’s been plenty of criticism of Barnes’ decision, but also a lot of support. Many feel like he’s made the best move possible after being put in a tough position – and that’s the point. Would you want to be Barnes, deciding best how to handle this radioactive hot potato, tossed to you by your boss, the vice-chair of the Board of Education, whose party has a 5-2 majority?

Barnhart argued that the process would have allowed a decision on Blended's merits, regardless of her identity.

“I started this process six months ago, not utilizing my position on the board to influence, but rather taking the appropriate channels all parents are given. Now, with these intentionally muddied waters, the process is tainted, which is unacceptable," she wrote.

There’s no evidence, and we’ve made no suggestion, that Barnhart used her position to influence the process. After all, both the school-level and district-level committees ruled against her request. But, again, given Barnhart’s request for a district-wide ban, her challenge was eventually going to land in front of Barnes, who would know it was from her. And beyond that, it would go to her fellow board members, with all the complications I’ve mentioned. To be blunt: once Barnhart decided to pursue this beyond her child's classroom, it was going to be a mess, irrespective of our reporting. The waters are, indeed, muddy – but we aren’t the ones who muddied them.

At the same time, Barnhart raises a good point – it's damned hard to be an elected official or a public figure and also a parent. I don’t have kids, but I’ve seen many struggle with it, some who left public office because of online harassment (or worse). Having kids already gives fate a hostage, as the saying goes, and that’s amplified when you take public office. I’m not sure Barnhart’s book complaint raises the stakes above where they already were given her public role, but maybe it does. I don’t want to dismiss that.

I give Barnhart credit for asking an important question: Should an elected official abdicate their rights as a parent when they take office? Certainly not when it comes to their child’s assignments and classroom. But what about when Barnhart called to have Blended pulled from all the shelves, rendering a decision for hundreds of other parents – who also ought to have a say? Where does the river of private life reach the ocean of official business?

I don’t have answers to these questions – but I am glad our reporting helped prompt them, because it seems unlikely that this issue will just go away.

Both the district-level committee and Barnhart have 15 days to appeal Barnes’ decision, so there’s more to follow here. We’re hoping to speak to Barnes on Monday, and flesh out more about his decision-making process, and whether he sees a precedent here. And, as I mentioned, we still hope to sit down with Barnhart and get her perspective.