No New School at Fort Campbell: The Money Went to Trump’s Border Wall

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/trump-border-wall-military-families.html?fbclid=IwAR3pkPo0YPXQMXIOn6fSHACHFm-X21fhplfIDGYTz5U_fVhqYJDqUhfNI5g

By Helene Cooper
Sept. 5, 2019

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 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.

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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 convince lawmakers that they should put money back into projects whose money has been diverted by the Pentagon to the wall.

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