A Connecticut Student’s Research Project Became a Casualty of Trump’s DEI Purge

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After landing a spot in a nationally-competitive fellowship program for high school students run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last summer, Keila Silva got to work investigating a local ice cream plant in Suffield.

The plant, operated by dairy company HP Hood, had been under scrutiny over its handling of potentially-hazardous ammonia chemicals — just down the road from one of Suffield’s only federally-assisted housing developments.

Silva, a 17-year-old senior at Suffield High School, wanted to know what impact the plant was having on her community, so she spent this school year combing through a trove of online records dating back to the 1990s.

She was putting the final touches on a report summarizing her findings last month when she got an email from a fellowship supervisor inviting her to an “emergency” meeting on Feb. 18. The purpose of that meeting, Silva soon learned, was to discuss the Trump administration’s latest directives related to “diversity, equity and inclusion” — a term broadly used to describe policies aimed at combating discrimination and civil rights violations and promoting diversity.

The message of the meeting was blunt: The federal government would no longer be supporting the projects she and her peers had spent months working on.

“It was heartbreaking to hear,” Silva said in a recent interview. “I had a feeling that it was going to happen, and I had personally been preparing myself for that reality, only because just seeing the news, it seemed like it was going to be inevitable, and unfortunately that ended up being true.”

While much of the focus on President Donald Trump’s massive revamping of the federal government has been on its impact to thousands of government workers, Silva’s story and others show how even high school students are getting caught up in the tumult. Last week, WSHU reported that a New Haven charter school was forced to lay off 70 students from a “green jobs” workforce development program after its federal funding was cut off.

In a statement Friday, Conservation Law Foundation staff attorney Rachel Briggs condemned the administration’s treatment of young people working on federally-backed climate and environmental policy programs. (Briggs is one of several local environmental advocates who have signed a letter of support for Silva’s work.)

“President Trump is dismantling vital agencies like NOAA and the [Environmental Protection Agency], laying off dedicated public servants and eliminating opportunities for young people committed to making their neighborhoods safer and healthier,” Briggs said. “We should be encouraging these young people who are driven to make a difference in the world and ensure that every community has clean water to drink and clean air to breathe. They are a model for all of us, particularly for those in the highest levels of our federal government.”

The Young Changemakers Fellowship began in 2023 as a joint effort between NOAA and the North American Association for Environmental Education, “dedicated to collaborating with and empowering the next generation of ocean and environmental leaders,” according a press release announcing the program’s continuation last year. The NAAEE, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., provided operational support for the program in cooperation with the federal agency.

Silva was part of the second cohort of fellows, which she said included students from ten other states, as well as Guam and American Samoa.

A notice now posted atop the program’s website states that fellowship will not run in the upcoming school year, but it doesn’t give an explanation.

The president’s executive order, which preceded the fellowship’s discontinuation called on officials to “coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

A spokesman for NOAA declined to comment on any changes made to the program as a result of Trump’s executive orders, citing a “long-standing practice” of not discussing internal personnel or management matters.

“NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” the spokesman, Scott Smullen, said in an email.

Stacie Pierpoint, a spokeswoman for NAAEE, said the decision to discontinue the program was made by federal authorities, and she declined to speculate on whether it might resume.

“We hope it comes back in the future,” Pierpoint said in an email. “We need more programs that build leadership and civic engagement skills and help protect people and the planet.”

Silva said she first became interested in environmental justice after participating in a conservation program for teenagers at the University of Connecticut during her sophomore year of high school. In that program, Silva said she used an EPA database to compare how people living in low-income and minority neighborhoods were being disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change.

“I have always been more of a social justice person” Silva said. “I didn’t go into environmental work really liking the science-y part of it.”

But as she dug into the data, Silva said she began to see connections between environmental conditions and social movements she’d previously expressed an interest in. Then one day when perusing the database, she noticed the Hood ice cream plant near her home had been identified as a hazardous waste site.

“Being one of the people who do live within this one-mile radius of the facility, it made me concerned, because I had no idea this was happening,” Silva said. “I had asked my family about that, because we lived in our home for about 40 years, and they had no idea about it.”

After she was accepted into the Young Changemakers Fellowship last year, Silva said she and her peers were told to explore questions of equity as part of the projects they’d be working on throughout the year. Because Suffield — a relatively affluent and mostly white town — has few places that are affordable for low-income residents, Silva said she decided to make the plant the subject of her project.

Silva focused on the plant’s proximity to a local housing development, Brook Hill Village, which town officials identified as one of the only developments utilizing government assistance for affordable family housing in a 2022 planning document. Residents of the census tract containing the development, she also noted, are more likely to be racial or ethnic minorities than in other areas of town.

Through her research, Silva identified 24 instances in which the Hood plant reported spills or chemical releases to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Those incidents involved ammonia, diesel fuel, wastewater and, in one case, 2,000 gallons of chocolate ice cream mix that that seeped out of a container into the plant.

While Silva’s report did not identify any specific instances in which Brook Hill Village residents suffered harmful health effects from the plants’ releases, she argued that its operations contributed to the area’s “moderate-high” environmental burden — a designation laid out in the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Environmental Justice Index.

(The database was one of several federal public health websites that a judge ordered restored in February after the Trump administration sought to pull them offline, citing to other outlets that the data did not conform with presidential executive orders related to diversity and gender identity. A notice now posted atop the ATSDR website states, “This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.”)

Before she could publish her findings, however, Silva said she and her peers were told by a fellowship supervisor at NOAA that if they chose continue with their projects they would have to remove any mention of their affiliation with the agency, its fellowship or the NAAEE, the nonprofit association supporting the fellowship.

Fortunately, Silva had already completed most of the work on her project and was able to quickly pivot to getting support from the Conservation Law Foundation as well as the Sierra Club and the Nonprofit Accountability Group, an advocacy organization based in Hartford. Representatives from each of those groups agreed to sign a cover letter endorsing Silva’s project, which she said lent credence to findings after it lost backing from NOAA.

Silva said that some of her peers in the program have found it more difficult to continue their work, particularly those whose projects relied on government-licensed GIS mapping software.

“They’re just devastated, but also angry,” Silva said. “We have our own group chat and everyone was blowing up like, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t expect this.'”

Ultimately, Silva published her findings earlier this month in a report that was sent to local officials in Suffield as well as Hood. She included a list of several recommendations for the company, including the installation of new chemical sensors to monitor releases, distributing fact sheets and engaging in community outreach with residents of the surrounding area.

Hood did not respond to requests for comment about Silva’s findings.

“Keila has done amazing research in her community to address an important pollution issue,” said Samantha Dynowski, the Connecticut state director for the Sierra Club. “The arbitrary decision of the Trump administration to cut off resources for this kind of work was unneeded and shouldn’t have been done.”

Since the meeting on Feb. 18, Silva said she and her peers have received emails from federal staffers working with the fellowship soliciting ideas for future meetings between now and the program’s end date in June. In addition, she said they’ve offered to provide advice for professional development and future careers, which for Silva means becoming an environmental justice attorney.

Silva said she’s planning to put the $750 honorarium she received as part of the fellowship towards college, and is waiting to hear back on applications to “around 20” schools where she is considering studying anthropology, sociology or public policy starting in the fall.

“It’s just kind of matter of making things fit, and adapting,” she said.

This article first appeared on CT Mirror and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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