A dispute between a private school and parents over two students’ expulsion might sound like a simple contract dispute. Yet Charlotte Latin’s four-year legal battle with Doug and Nicole Turpin has reached North Carolina’s highest court.
The Turpins’ lawsuit recently attracted attention from two Republican members of Congress and nearly a dozen state legislators. They support the parents. On the other side, state and regional groups representing independent schools support Charlotte Latin.
It’s a case that could alter the future of private education in North Carolina.
The dispute stems from Doug Turpin’s questions in 2021 about changes his family perceived in Charlotte Latin’s approach toward education.
Speaking to Carolina Journal in 2023, Turpin praised the school for providing an “apolitical classical education” before the George Floyd riots of 2020. Afterward, Charlotte Latin sent “puzzling” emails “that sounded like virtue signaling,” Turpin said. “Then strange things began to appear in the school that were rather alarming to Christian parents like us.”
For example, the school displayed on a hallway wall a student drawing featuring Jesus with a slit throat and the words “God is dead” written on his forehead.
After Turpin and other parents raised concerns, the school ended its dealings with the Turpin family. That meant kicking out the two Turpin children.
“Latin severed its relationship with Doug and Nicole, blindsiding the family by expelling their children without warning at a meeting billed merely as a discussion,” according to a court brief.
The parents sued. Lower courts have ruled against them, including a 2-1 decision from the North Carolina Court of Appeals in April 2024. That court’s majority focused on Charlotte Latin’s contractual right to end students’ enrollment.
To rule for the Turpins “would severely undermine the fundamental right to freely contract in North Carolina, which is a bedrock principle of North Carolina law,” Judge John Arrowood wrote.
Yet the case now has advanced to the North Carolina Supreme Court, the final authority on state law.
“When private schools unfairly retaliate against students and their parents, can the schools be held accountable?” That question appears early in a friend-of-the-court brief filed May 1 at the high court. “That’s where Charlotte Latin broke its promises, smeared the Turpins in public, and expelled the children. If the decision below stands, it grants schools unfettered discretion to engage in such retaliatory conduct, undermining the foundational trust between families and schools in North Carolina.”
US Reps. Richard Hudson and Pat Harrigan of North Carolina’s Ninth and 10th congressional districts endorsed that language. So did four Republican state senators and seven members of the North Carolina House of Representatives. A dozen outside interest groups backed the brief.
The elected officials and interested groups warned about “the inherent unfairness faced by parents and students when private schools expel students under retaliatory or arbitrary circumstances.” They advocated use of North Carolina’s law against unfair and deceptive practices — NC Gen. Stat. § 75-1.1 — “as a vital remedy for safeguarding the commercial relationship between private schools and the families they serve.”
“The Turpins’ ordeal exemplifies the vulnerability of families in private educational settings,” the brief argued. “After following the school’s prescribed channels for dialogue about curricular concerns, the Turpins were met with severe retaliation — their children were summarily expelled and the parents were defamed.”
The Appeals Court “absolved Latin from accountability” by rejecting the Turpins’ lawsuit at the earliest possible stage of litigation.
Yet North Carolina’s ban on unfair and deceptive practices should help protect against this type of “misconduct,” the brief explained.
“The relationship between parents and private schools is commercial, involving hefty financial payments and explicit contractual promises,” the court filing added. “Private schools should not be immune from the law when they engage in unfair or deceptive practices toward the families they serve. Misrepresentations and unfair retaliation, such as experienced by the Turpins, violate the core principle of fair business dealings that section 75-1.1 was designed to guarantee.”
A dissenting appellate judge, Republican Julee Flood, would have allowed the Turpins to pursue their case.
“The line between the right to terminate a private contract and a contract breach is sometimes mercurial,” Flood wrote. “[W]e must decline to draw that line prematurely.”
The Turpins “sufficiently stated a claim for breach of contract,” she added.
A win now at North Carolina’s highest court would not necessarily end the legal battle. The Turpins likely would return to a trial judge. They would restart the process of trying to prove their accusations against Charlotte Latin.
It’s an opportunity Doug Turpin and his supporters would welcome.
Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.