Middle Creek Elementary School is one of North Carolina’s largest elementary schools. When classes began for the 2026-2027 school year this month, parents believed that everything would be business as usual. But just one week into the school year, one dad said his children came home with alarming questions.
Aaron Driver, whose three children attend Middle Creek Elementary School found out just days after classes began that his children’s elementary school had hired a non-binary, cross-dressing music teacher. The biological male teacher reportedly was asking students to use “she/her” pronouns and call her “Miss.” A photo posted by the teacher showed him wearing pentagrams, a Satanic symbol that raised further alarms for Driver and other Christian parents.
Parents weren’t informed about the newly hired transgender teacher until after he had already been hired, Driver said.
Making matters worse, the new hire teaches a musical course that all students are required to take and which parents are not allowed to opt out of.
Driver and his wife have a son in third grade as well as two daughters in kindergarten. Their children brought it up to him immediately, coming home from school telling them, “My teacher is a man who wears a dress,” Driver recalled.
“It’s all new to my children. My daughters are five, and my hope is that this will be a blip in their experience and they won’t think much about it. I pray for them every day,”he told IW Features.
Driver knew he was going to have to raise the issue with school officials, but also understood it would be better to do so with the backing of other concerned parents. So he formed a parents’ group online called Middle Creek Parental Rights, which already has around 60 members.
Driver then attended the next Wake County school board meeting, where he claims he was outnumbered by a ratio of 20 to one. However, most of the people attending the meeting in support of the nonbinary teacher were not parents, but activists, he claimed.
“It was a coordinated effort to put on a show,” Driver said, adding that several of these activists attempted to intimidate him and make him feel unwelcome.
During the meeting, school board member Lynn Edmonds defended the teacher’s hiring, arguing it would give parents and students an opportunity to have discussions about their “diverse world.”
Driver took this as a recognition that the school board understood how controversial the hiring had been, and were using it as an opportunity to force children to have conversations about sexual orientation and gender ideology.
Indeed, this wouldn’t be the first time school officials pushed radical topics on students against parents’ wishes. Middle Creek’s principal, Dr. Sarah Stephens, has a history of advocating radical ideology in schools. Her dissertation was titled “Equity-Focused School Improvement” and pushed for diversity, equity, and inclusion policies to be further implemented in classrooms.
Driver admitted the blowback that he and other concerned parents have faced has been difficult. One school board member referred to him and the Parental Rights group as “the worst of Wake County.” Driver’s wife has had several of her friends sever their relationships with her. And navigating things like birthday parties and after-school events have now become diplomatic minefields.
“In my opinion, this feels like a way for schools to scare [Christians] out of schools. Online and in meetings, I’ve been told that I should just homeschool my kids because they want to exclude me from the public school system. They’re trying to exclude Christians and take away our constitutional rights to raise your children according to your faith,” Driver said.
But Driver isn’t backing down. He is now being represented by the Thomas Moore Society in Chicago, Illinois, and his Middle Creek Parental Rights group is pushing for a full investigation into the hiring of the cross-dressing teacher and demanding that the school provide parents with ample notice regarding how they plan to address the inevitable questions about gender ideology that will arise.
The parents are also asking that the school stop requiring students to refer to the male teacher as “Miss.”
Additionally, they are also requesting transparency on how the teacher would handle emergency situations, such as if a child could be taken into a private female space like a restroom.
“It feels like a concerted effort nationally,” said Driver. “My concern is that this is happening in other places, all at once.”
