Sarah Ladd, Kentucky Lantern
Jessica Henninger wants to protect her children from the political climate that briefly closed their school library at Fort Campbell and led to books being removed from the shelves.
“There’s a very fine line between having your children be aware of what’s going on in the world around them, and not burdening them with adult things,” Henninger said. “But … when (Black History Month) projects are canceled after you’ve completed them … they notice that stuff.”
Citing her husband’s military service and their joint devotion to the U.S. Constitution, Henninger has joined a federal lawsuit on behalf of her children, citing First Amendment concerns and asking the courts to block President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders in schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA). Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is a defendant.
Henninger has five children: two have graduated from DODEA schools and three are still students, named in the lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union filed Tuesday. That suit challenges U.S. Department of Defense policies that led to schools at Fort Campbell and other military bases removing books about slavery and civil rights.
Henninger, whose husband is in the military and is stationed at Fort Campbell, has lived in Kentucky since October.
Before that, in all their travels, “I can’t recall a time in our years at DODEA where my children’s curriculum was affected by anything that was going on in the presidency,” Henninger told a small group of reporters over Zoom on Wednesday.
“We owe our children to be honest,” she said. “I’m very fearful that these actions (are) trying to take away my children’s opportunities to learn about integral parts of our history, our American history … and different cultures. That’s what makes education — and life — rich. It’s all of those differences. My younger children … they deserve the right to learn about that stuff.”
The lawsuit: ‘Books shouldn’t be banned’
Via executive order Trump directed schools receiving federal funding to not teach “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals;” he also told the Armed Forces to dissolve DEI offices and directed all federal agencies to recognize only cisgender male and female identities.
In February, Clarksville Now, a news outlet in Clarksville, Tennessee, reported Fort Campbell librarians were busy “scrubbing for books that contain references to slavery, the civil rights movement and anything else related to diversity, equity and inclusion” in compliance with Trump’s orders.
Fort Campbell is an Army base that spans the Kentucky-Tennessee border between Hopkinsville and Clarksville.
Fort Campbell schools also had to remove “bulletin boards that reference Black History Month and Black leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks,” according to Clarksville Now.
Corey Shapiro, legal director for the ACLU of Kentucky, said Wednesday he hopes for a preliminary injunction to “get some relief sooner rather than later from the court.”
“We’re still evaluating exactly the timing on next steps and building that out,” he said.
He also wants to see more transparency around which books are removed from shelves, and where those books go.
But, he asserted: “none of these books should be taken out.”
“To some extent, it doesn’t really matter whether we have a list or sort of engage in a debate on which individual book is the appropriate thing,” Shapiro said. “The issue here is that books shouldn’t be banned from school libraries. Kids should have an opportunity to have access to all the books in the school library without fear that somebody in the Department of Defense is going to determine that it shouldn’t be there based on an executive order regarding a ban on certain types of viewpoints.”
‘I could not abide’
Soon after the executive orders, Henninger “started getting emails from the kids’ teachers, basically that just made me think that there was something going on.”
She got “notifications that assignments were being canceled, then that the library just unexpectedly closed down.”
She immediately started investigating, contacted the ACLU to help and ultimately joined the multi-state federal lawsuit in an attempt to block the Trump administration from carrying out the anti-DEI orders.
“I have a very strong belief that children should have access to books,” said Henninger, who is herself a “voracious reader.”
“When I was a child, I read. That’s how I learned about the world around me. It’s how I learned about other people and life experiences outside of my own,” she said. “And I feel like that is an important part of being able to understand other people. And to have those options taken away from my children was something that I have never experienced before.”
All her children, too, love books, she said.
“We’ve never had an administration come in and interfere in this way with our children’s education,” she said. “My husband fights for our constitutional rights and our freedoms in this country, and to see those rights being taken away from my children was just absolutely something that I could not abide.”
After the lawsuit was filed, Michael O’Day, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense Education Activity, said he couldn’t comment on an active lawsuit but offered praise for the agency’s “dedication to providing an exceptional educational experience for every student.” More than 67,000 students worldwide are enrolled in schools run by the DODEA.
“Our curriculum, rigorously aligned with DoDEA’s proven standards, has earned us the distinction of being the top-ranked school system in the United States for four consecutive years, based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Nation’s Report Card,” O’Day said in a statement. “These standards promote academic excellence, critical thinking, and a learning environment that empowers all military-connected students to excel.”
Henninger attributes the success in part to the diversity of the student body.
“I think part of this strength is our diversity — the diversity of people that come together and we learn from each other, and that’s part of our strength,” she said. “And so to see that potentially being taken away from my younger children? That’s harmful.”
She believes the executive orders are politically motivated and cited the Trump administration’s deportations of immigrants, saying his presidential campaign was “propped on” immigration issues.
“And then when you see them coming into the libraries and removing those items … common sense would dictate that two plus two equals four. That’s definitely politically motivated,” she said.
‘We can’t whitewash’ history
For military families like Henninger’s, DODEA schools are often the only option, though that can vary based on where a soldier is stationed. Private education is expensive. Henninger’s best path was to fight back within the DODEA system, she said.
Other plaintiffs represented by the ACLU are enrolled in Defense Department schools in Virginia, Italy and Japan.
“We don’t have a lot of the same recourses that that families have in the public education system. We can’t just go to our school board and and say, ‘This is unacceptable.’ We very much have to worry about retaliation and retribution. And so there’s a lot of stress and anxiety around that for a lot of people, which is understandable,” Henninger said.
Never miss a thing with our FREE weekly newsletter.
She and her husband talked about the risks of joining such a lawsuit and ultimately decided she had to.
“Basically what it boiled down to (for my husband) was: ‘I joined the military to defend the Constitution, and if I can’t defend our children’s constitutional rights, then what am I doing as a soldier?’”
Her children “have their First Amendment rights just like everybody else. It’s not fair to them just because their father is a soldier that they shouldn’t be able to have the same rights as everybody else.”
She wants her children to learn about the full history of their country, including the “not so pretty parts: the Trail of Tears and slavery and the fight for civil rights.”
“It is our true history,” she said. “And we can’t whitewash that away.”
