Aging military school loses funding to border wall
WASHINGTON — For almost two decades, families at Fort Campbell, the sprawling Army base along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, have borne the brunt of the country’s war efforts as a steady clip of troops with the 101st Airborne Division and from Special Operations units deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq.
This week, the families discovered that they would not get the new middle school they were expecting so that President Donald Trump could build his border wall. The school is on the list of 127 projects, touching nearly every facet of American military life, that will be suspended to shift $3.6 billion to the wall.
The Pentagon’s decision to divert $62.6 million from the construction of Fort Campbell’s middle school means that 552 students in sixth, seventh and eighth grades will continue to cram themselves in, 30 to a classroom in some cases, at the base’s aging Mahaffey Middle School. Teachers at Mahaffey will continue to use mobile carts to store their books, lesson plans and homework assignments because there is not enough classroom space. Students stuffed into makeshift classrooms-within-classrooms will continue to strain to figure out which lesson to listen to and which one to filter out.
And since the cafeteria at Mahaffey is not big enough to seat everyone at lunchtime, some students will continue to eat in the school library.
“Most of our students don’t know what it’s like to live in a world without war, where you don’t have to worry about Mom or Pop being killed,” said Jane Loggins, a Fort Campbell teacher who is the director of the Federal Education Association’s Stateside Region, the teachers’ union for the Defense Department’s education system in the United States and Guam. “The one big benefit of this school is that we try to support all those emotional needs.”
In normal times, the Fort Campbell middle school project would have a powerful political ally in Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. and the Senate majority leader. In a January op-ed in The Louisville Courier-Journal headlined “Here’s How Kentucky Families Benefit From McConnell’s Clout in D.C.,” McConnell boasted that he had “secured much-needed assistance for Fort Campbell, Fort Knox and the Blue Grass Army Depot, helping the men and women serving there keep America safe.”
But that was before Trump declared in February that there was a national emergency at the border with Mexico, allowing him to divert money from military projects without first getting approval from Congress. The next month, McConnell backed the president in a Senate vote on the national emergency declaration. (Kentucky’s other Republican senator, Rand Paul, voted against Trump.)
McConnell’s office said that the senator recently spoke with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper about the issue and is “committed to protecting funding for the Fort Campbell middle school project.” David Popp, a spokesman for McConnell, said that “we would not be in this situation if Democrats were serious about protecting our homeland and worked with us to provide the funding needed to secure our borders during our appropriations process.”
Asked on the CBS program “Face the Nation” in February about the prospect that the Fort Campbell middle school could be sacrificed for the border wall, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the border came before education. “It’s better for the middle school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border,” Graham said. “We’ll get them the school they need, but right now we’ve got a national emergency on our hands.”
Two active-duty military service members in Fort Campbell said Thursday that they believed McConnell would step in to save the middle school. One of the service members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not want to be identified discussing the issue, said families had been waiting for the new school for three years.
Across the globe, projects like the Fort Campbell middle school have been shelved, including an elementary school in Wiesbaden, Germany, and a cyberoperations center in Virginia.
Defense Department officials insist that military construction projects are not being canceled and said that their hope was to get Congress to replace the funding for the middle school and the other projects.
But, privately, several department officials acknowledged that their position was tenuous. After circumventing the will of a Congress that refused to fund the wall, the department faces an uphill task trying to persuade lawmakers that they should put money back into projects whose money has been diverted by the Pentagon to the wall.
“President Trump has stooped to new lows in trying to illegally fund more border wall,” Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said in a statement. “Our troops and their families deserve better.”
Trump has defended the diversion of funds. Esper “feels it’s a national security problem,” the president said on Wednesday. “I do, too.” The Defense Department education system was born as a response to segregated schools in the South. After the military integrated in 1948, officials developed a school system so that the children of service members in the South could go to integrated schools. Teachers are usually civilians or retired veterans. All together, the department runs 163 schools in seven states and 11 countries, educating more than 70,000 students.
Paul Eaton, a retired Army major general, had seven schools under his watch when he was the commanding general at Fort Benning, Georgia. He said that because the military had more sway over parents than an ordinary school system would, the military schools have higher family participation rates. The schools, he said, are a natural part of life on U.S. military bases.
“What Trump has done, to take money from the Department of Defense school system for this artifice called a southern wall, to deny new school construction, is just crazy,” he said.
At Fort Campbell, Mahaffey Middle School, around 40 years old, has for more than a decade been in want of deep renovations. As far back as 2007, the Senate Armed Services Committee was hearing testimony from local teachers that the school needed help. “Garbage cans catch water from a leaking room while a broken heating and air-conditioning system produces sauna-like conditions in some classrooms, while other classes have no heat,” Misti K. Stevens, then a member of the Military Child Education Coalition, said in written testimony.
The problems persist today, Fort Campbell service members said. The air-conditioning system at the school is pieced together, they said, and classrooms often run too hot or too cold.
Two years ago the base’s other middle school, Wassom Middle School, shut down, and those students were all sent to Mahaffey, nearly doubling the size of the student body. Teachers and parents were told that this would be a stopgap measure while a new, unified Fort Campbell Middle School would be housed in the old Fort Campbell High School, which would be renovated. The base’s high school students moved to the new Fort Campbell High School last year.
Now, the stay at Mahaffey is extended indefinitely.
“This is like a gut punch to this faculty,” said Venita Garnett, the president of the Fort Campbell Education Association, the local teachers’ union. “And who is carrying the burden of so many years of war? It’s these schoolchildren.”
