The Army has severed a long-standing partnership with Ashley Hall, an all-girls preparatory school in Charleston, South Carolina, as the Pentagon radically recalibrates its approach to diversity under President Donald Trump.
For the first time since 2017, the Army Corps of Engineers will not participate in Ashley Hall's annual "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day," an outreach event scheduled for Friday. The initiative, once a staple of the Army's public engagement efforts, was designed to draw students into science and engineering careers, fields where the military has long struggled to fill critical roles due to steep academic requirements.
The decision comes after the Army and other services dropped recruiting efforts at a prestigious Black engineering event in Baltimore this month, despite Army Recruiting Command's long-standing public partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered that programs or policies acknowledging a diverse military force or promoting women, people of minority backgrounds, and gay and lesbian troops be eliminated.
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Privately, recruiters and other Army officials are increasingly confused over what is considered a diversity event and whether any public engagement remotely associated with a gender or ethnicity is off the table.
A spokesperson for the school did not return a request for comment. The Department of Defense also scrubbed some mentions of events at Ashley Hall in previous years from the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, or DVIDS, which hosts news releases, photos and other information for the public.
Much of the Army is in the midst of auditing recruiting and other public occasions for any indication they can be perceived as being associated with women or minorities, multiple officials have explained. The engagement at the all-girls school was centered around science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM.
"Yes, [the Army Corps of Engineers] pulled out of the STEM outreach event at Ashley Hall this year and will continue to review its personnel, policies and programs to ensure it remains in compliance with law and presidential orders," an Army spokesperson said in a statement attributed to an anonymous official. It was unclear why a service official requested anonymity to discuss complying with executive orders issued by Trump.
The decision to cut ties with the Ashley Hall girls school and the high-profile Black engineering event were not the only recent incidents in which the military appeared to be distancing itself from women and Black Americans.
The Maryland National Guard also canceled a planned flyover Feb. 22 for an event celebrating Frederick Douglass, one of the most important Black civil rights advocates of the 19th century. And the Army Band canceled a concert at George Mason University in Virginia, where it was set to play music by Janelle Monáe, a Black singer and rapper.
Such engagements are often a way to connect with Americans and bolster recruiting, which has been a steep challenge for most of the military in recent years. Specifically, outreach to promising students involved in science and engineering could also be valuable to the Army and other military services as fewer Americans are eligible to serve, due to not meeting physical and academic standards.
The Army started turning around its yearslong recruiting slump last year after it invested heavily into pre-basic training courses to get applicants into compliance with academic and body weight standards.
Many of the Pentagon's recruiting woes are tied to the fact only an estimated one-quarter of young Americans are eligible to serve, amid plummeting school test scores and an ongoing obesity epidemic. Those issues are much more prevalent in boys and young men, and recent recruiting gains are attributed to a consistent and reliable pool of women enlisting.
Studies have shown boys are falling behind girls in nearly every academic category, including reading and writing -- a gap that starts in elementary school and widens over time. Young men are also much less likely to finish college, trends that are even more common among male minorities.
