After losing her home to the devastating Hurricane Harvey in 2017, former science and special-education teacher Brooke Weiss hoped for a fresh start in Charlotte, NC. And yet, because of her membership in the nonprofit parents rights organization Moms for Liberty, Weiss found herself stonewalled, underemployed, and even targeted by the FBI––all at the hands of a bureaucracy that seemingly wanted silence and conformity more than it needed qualified teachers.
“I’ve been with Moms for Liberty since the very beginning, and I’ve caused some shock waves in Charlotte, which is a very blue city,” Weiss explained in an interview with IW Features. “We have a very successful chapter here, and I made a name for myself as an education activist, which made things harder and harder for me as a teacher.”
Weiss said she was initially able to find a few outlier schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) district that were happy to have her fill much-needed long-term substitute teaching jobs in special needs and science education. But she claims she was blacklisted when she later tried to apply for permanent positions in the district.
“No matter how excited the schools would get and no matter how great the interviews would go, my applications would just get ghosted at the district level,” Weiss said. “Eventually, even the subbing jobs that I picked up would be canceled the day before or the day of––just dropped in the substituting system.”
Initially confused about why she wasn’t getting hired––especially since Weiss said she was well-liked by students and staff and never brought her activism into the classroom––she eventually realized what had first set off the district’s alarm bells.
“There was a teacher at another high school in the district who went to school in her furry costume,” Weiss said. “She publicly posted a picture of herself in her furry costume with a caption that said, ‘infiltrating my classroom.’”
Weiss told IW Features she took a screenshot of the publicly shared photo and reposted it, which earned her a two-week suspension for violating the district’s “social media policy.” The district, she claimed, never provided her with any information regarding the policy, and she still has no idea what exactly she did to violate it.
On top of that, Weiss said she raised the ire of district bureaucracy and local activists by becoming an active participant in local school board meetings as a member of Moms for Liberty, hoping to raise awareness among parents about what was really being taught in their children’s schools.
“It got so bad that I had to be escorted to my car because I was getting screamed at and threatened by people who showed up in opposition to me,” she said. “People had to be removed from school board meetings because of the way they confronted me.”
They were confronting her because her activism worked: Weiss exposed the CMS district’s “Gender Support Plann” at a school board meeting. While it was thankfully outlawed in 2023, when North Carolina passed the Parents Bill of Rights, parents at the time were shocked to learn that CMS was systematically concealing minor students’ “gender identities” from their families and even secretly socially transitioning students at school.
“The parents couldn’t believe it. They were, justifiably, absolutely outraged,” she said.
Around this time, Weiss said that the FBI visited her home twice, the first time leaving a business card, and the second time attempting to enter. Since they did not have a warrant, Weiss did not let them in.
To this day, Weiss is not entirely sure why the FBI singled her out—but she believes it may be due to the Biden administration’s labeling of parents and parents-rights activists like Moms for Liberty members as “domestic terrorists.”
“We do have lawsuits out as a national organization now, and have obtained through public-records request documentation that our members and our leaders were targeted by the Biden administration,” she said.
Regardless of who sent the FBI to her house, Weiss asserted that her inability to work within CMS is due to an impenetrable district bureaucracy, not individual schools. Although she is no longer teaching, she remains committed to her work with Moms for Liberty and is focused on equipping the next generation of parents with the tools they need to advocate for their children.
“We [at Moms for Liberty]…mobilize parents, get people in the community to school board meetings, and get emails sent to legislators and representatives […] we actually get that stuff done,” Weiss said. “They don’t like us because we’re effective.”
