Observe the reactions and actions from teachers and kids at DODEA schools in response to the Commander-in-Chief’s and Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s orders to eliminate Marxist-rooted CRT/DEI ideology. It shows the woke indoctrination the teachers were pushing and what military kids were getting inculcated with. The above image has unusually professionally-made graphics for a student group urging DODEA kids to protest.
Students at military bases around world rebel against Trump DEI crackdown
By Angie Orellana Hernandez and Dan Lamothe | Washington Post
Anxious teachers have removed Pride flags, and posters promoting “gender ideology” are forbidden at the school serving U.S. military families that 18-year-old Finn Dwyer attends.
The Pentagon has moved swiftly to restrict access to learning materials covering subjects including immigration and psychology in its global network of schools as part of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion .
“It makes you wonder, ‘What is the next move?’ … It’s unpredictable to an extent, and it’s scary because of that,” said Dwyer, a senior at Ramstein High School in Germany who organized a walkout involving hundreds of classmates this month to protest the removal of materials from libraries and curriculums.
Student-led walkouts have occurred on military facilities in Wiesbaden, Ramstein, Stuttgart and Kaiserslautern in Germany; Camp Humphreys in South Korea; and at bases in Kadena, Okinawa, and Yokosuka in Japan, with dozens or hundreds of students participating in most locations.
Students are increasingly communicating online about their plans, they said, and a larger walkout is planned for April involving as many as 25 of the 160 schools operated by Department of Defense Education Activity .
“Our schools are kind of almost becoming a political playground,” said Mary Hardy, 16, a high school junior in Kadena, where dozens of students recently walked out of school in a short protest. “Things are being taken out of the classroom, but they’re not being taken out the same across DoDEA, so it’s creating all these gaps, and it’s placing all these kids at significant disadvantages.”
The protests began soon after DoDEA restructured curricula to comply with Trump’s executive orders.
Carrying out the orders is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who accused government schools for years of indoctrinating students to hate their country, writing in his 2022 book, “Battle for the American Mind,” that curricula often teach children to “roll their eyes at religion and disdain our history.”
The DoDEA system serves about 67,000 students, most of whom are concentrated overseas on military installations where U.S. families live on multiyear assignments.
Student-led protests have caught DoDEA officials between their aim to support military families and the Trump administration, which controls the agency more directly than civilian public schools that are largely steered by state and local policy.
The protests also demonstrate how military families are not uniformly behind the effort to stamp out DEI.
A DoDEA spokesman, Will Griffin, said in a statement that the agency supports students’ “peaceful expressions of their opinions so long as it is done respectfully, does not interfere with the rights of others, and does not detract from learning.”
DoDEA encourages students to explore a variety of ways to engage civically, he added, including student government, service projects and discussions with school leaders to make a positive impact in their school communities.
Griffin said DoDEA is reviewing its policies and the instructional materials it uses in schools to ensure they comport with the recent directives. The “vast majority” of materials in DoDEA’s curriculum do not contain content that is “inconsistent with President Trump’s and Secretary Hegseth’s guidance concerning DEI,” Griffin said.
Pentagon spokesmen John Ullyot and Sean Parnell did not respond to several requests for comment.
Among the materials initially targeted for removal from classrooms and libraries under Trump’s orders were a book chapter in a psychology course for advanced-placement high-schoolers about gender and sexuality, a lesson for fifth-graders about how immigration affects the United States and the book “Becoming Nicole,” a nonfiction work about a family coming to accept their transgender daughter, according to a February memo obtained by the Post.
Another February memo sent to administrators and school-level employees by DoDEA Europe Chief of Staff Charles Kelker banned “cultural awareness observances”; email signature blocks containing “self-identified pronouns”; references to “gender” in school documents; and trans youths from using bathrooms that don’t align with their biological sex or signs that support “the inculcation or promotion of gender ideology.”
Trans students who may experience “emotional/psychological distress” over being misgendered at school are still eligible to receive mental health support, Kelker wrote. However, the counseling “must remain objective and neutral in its application without taking action that would unlawfully facilitate the gender transition of a minor student.”
Allison McKenzie, a sophomore at the high school on Ramstein Air Base in Germany, said the changes are “universally hated” among students.
Even small changes, such as the disappearance of LGBTQ+ posters, feel “insidious,” said an 18-year-old participant in the Ramstein walkout on March 6 who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for retaliation against her military family.
On the day of the Ramstein walkout, more than 200 students – about a quarter of the school – left class to march around the track field with handmade signs that read “politicized education is indoctrination” and “hate won’t make America great.”
School administrators supported the students’ decision to exercise their free speech rights, according to another 18-year-old at Ramstein who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his military family.
The first protests at military installations began Feb. 11, when dozens of students walked out of Patch Middle School in Stuttgart, Germany, as Hegseth visited the nearby headquarters of U.S. European Command and U.S. Africa Command.
In his 2022 book, Hegseth wrote that DEI was how educators obfuscated “their Marxist aims in cozy language.”
He has continued to be outspoken on the subject over the years, arguing in a November interview that parents who rely on public schools could find their “kid is 18 and is a Marxist or thinks they’re the other gender or is self-loathing because they’ve been indoctrinated to believe because they’re White, they’re racist.”
Since Hegseth’s visit to Germany, protests have spread.
At Kadena in Japan, Hardy said, school administrators estimated that about 60 students participated in a walkout. One of the biggest struggles, she said, was getting participation from students who were either apathetic or concerned about whether disciplinary action would be taken.
While serving in uniform has long been seen as a family business among many military families, Hardy said recent events have made some students reconsider their plans. One student told her he was planning to enlist in the military right after high school but is now considering going to college.
Hardy said feedback to the protest was largely positive, but she did hear reluctance from some teachers and administrators about what they were doing.
One teacher was “very adamant” that pictures of a banner students carried during the walkout could not be taken in her classroom, seemingly because she was concerned about getting disciplined, Hardy said.
“There were definitely some teachers … that said they were really proud of what we were doing and wanted us to use our voices,” Hardy said. “Even though they couldn’t be there at the protest, they wanted to.”
The students’ frustration at the Trump administration has been exacerbated by a freeze on government purchase cards that halted a wide range of work, including the identification of missing U.S. soldiers and trash collection at national parks.
Michelle Howard-Brahaney, a senior DoDEA official in Europe, told military families and employees in a memo Wednesday that DoDEA’s scholastic athletic events would be postponed until “funding and travel become available,” regretfully linking the postponement directly to the freeze on government travel cards.
Griffin, the DoDEA spokesman, acknowledged in a statement late Thursday that “some events” over the span of a few days had been “paused” as part of the administration’s freeze on government-issued travel card spending. DoDEA later received “further guidance” to continue athletics and other undefined “mission-related” extracurricular activities.
DoDEA, like most federal agencies, also has been waiting to see how the Trump administration decides to carry out a plan to fire tens of thousands of probationary workers, who have typically either worked for the federal government for less than a year or two or have recently been promoted to a new job. Griffin said DoDEA has sought exemptions to shield its employees from the firings, but it is not yet clear whether they will be granted.
DoDEA’s DEI Agenda: Are Military Schools Pushing Ideological Activism?
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