Highlands Latin School series Cost of Empire community response

In the weeks since The Courier Journal published a multipart investigative project focused on the rise of Louisville's Highlands Latin School, more former students have come forward with descriptions of their treatment at the school and calls for accountability.

Meanwhile, Crescent Hill Baptist Church, which leases space to Highlands Latin’s longest-established campus on Frankfort Avenue, says it will insist on answers about allegations of mistreatment and is rethinking its business relationship with the school.

Published on Sept. 25, "The Cost of Empire" series looked at how Highlands Latin grew from a living-room operation to a classical Christian education juggernaut with campuses across the nation, a prominent homeschool publishing house and an online academy.

Parts of that empire, The Courier Journal found, attracted educators with far-right, extremist views, including one who advocated using Highlands Latin's brand of education "to take back the West for white peoples."

The series also included accounts from students who described how a high-pressure environment, bullying and harsh punishments for small infractions exacted tolls that lasted into adulthood.

"The Cost of Empire" has also prompted criticism, ranging from reader letters to the podcast of a nationally prominent evangelical leader to parents who reached out to tell stories of their children succeeding at the school.

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Amid the conversations, neither Highlands Latin's president, Brian Lowe, nor its head of school, Shawn Wheatley, have responded to interview requests from The Courier Journal.

More than two decades later, the experiences Joshua Sessanga and his friend, Eric Moeller, had at HLS stick with them.

When Sessanga arrived at Highlands Latin as a teenager, he was one of two Black students at the school, he said, with the other being his younger brother.

He quickly formed a bond with Moeller and a group of other boys. They sometimes goofed around, broke the strict dress code and left campus, but weren’t doing anything extreme, Moeller said.

“What we would notice is that Josh was always the one that was getting in trouble,” Moeller, now 37, recalled. “I would do the exact same thing as him — in fact, if anything, I was an influence on him — and he would be the one that would get in trouble.”

In time, it became a bit of a game, and Moeller started testing what he could get away with.

One day, Moeller sat through much of a class wearing a University of Kentucky baseball cap. It was a clear dress code violation, but the teacher didn't say anything.

Then, Sessanga took the cap off Moeller’s head and put it on his own.

The teacher “looked back and he immediately knew I was wearing a hat. And he hit the roof,” Sessanga said.

Soon after the incident, the teacher was sitting down for a meeting with Sessanga, his mother and a school administrator.

Sessanga, now 37, felt like they were building a case against him as they described how he was negatively impacting the school, and Moeller in particular.

When he tried to explain about the hat incident, he said the teacher told him: “You just stand out more.”

Days before the next school year started, Sessanga’s mother received a letter from an administrator saying he was no longer welcome at HLS.

“They just completely crushed me. I never really trusted another adult,” said Sessanga, who went on to serve in the U.S. Army for 12 years, rising to the rank of sergeant and serving in Afghanistan.

As the son of first-generation African immigrants, Sessanga said HLS and other local Christian schools he attended gave him a “civil rights crash course.”

“I learned that I’m not going to get away with stuff the way my friends are,” he said.

“Only my tie is looked at, only my belt is looked at, only I’m not allowed to wear a hoodie. It dehumanized me as being the only Black kid.”

Moeller, who believes he was a model HLS student in the eyes of the administration for most of his time there, also found himself called into a meeting, where he said an administrator expressed how disappointed she was in him and said she never should have brought Sessanga to the school.

"I remember vividly her looking at me, so seriously, and saying: 'Eric, you were my prince. What happened to you?'" he said.

He still thinks about the moment.

"I just remember feeling so humiliated. Like, did I actually do something wrong here?" he said. "I really should have stood up in that meeting instead of just shrink away like I did. But I was just a kid, you know? I was a junior. I was just this little kid that didn't stand up for himself."

While Sessanga and Moeller agreed to let The Courier Journal use their names, other students requested their names, and in some cases, other defining information, be withheld. Like some former students who spoke to The Courier Journal for "The Cost of Empire," they cited worries about harming relationships with people close to them.

One former student left HLS after the eighth grade and went on to graduate from a local public school earlier this year.

“The high pressure and depression, it was getting to a point where it was just unbearable there,” she said of her family’s decision to pull her from HLS.

She recounted a class in seventh grade where an HLS teacher asked if anyone in the class did not identify as cisgender. The student, who identifies as genderfluid, kept their hand down, as did all other students.

“After she realized that no one was going to raise their hand, she just started talking about how weird (it was) and how she couldn’t understand it all. Just how ‘God doesn’t get things wrong,’ ever,” she said.

Like other former students The Courier Journal spoke to, she described a rigid system where students are taught not to question those in power.

“You’ve been taught, from a very young age there, that authority figures are infallible,” she said. “It was very much the attitude of ‘adults are always right, and if you disagree with an adult, then you’re just wrong.’”

Another student, now in her mid-20s, said she witnessed incidents described in "The Cost of Empire," including one where an elementary school teacher threw a metal water bottle at a wall after a student accidentally spilled water on a test.

After the outburst, the teacher acted like nothing happened, she said. The students followed suit.

“Looking back at that, that’s not the correct response that any healthy person would have. And we were in a situation where we were just expected to follow the teacher and not question authority in any way,” she said. “We didn’t make a fuss about it, and we should have.”

Several years later, she was part of a group of girls who were talking in the bathroom, waiting for one of their moms to pick them up after their math tutoring. There was a dance that night and they were excited.

While they were talking, an administrator came in and confronted them, she said, accusing them of skipping their after-school tutoring, because the teacher was still on the premises with other students.

The girls were brought to the office, where they were reprimanded by another administrator who compared their behavior to that of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus Christ, leading to his death by crucifixion.

“For a seventh- or eighth-grade girl to hear that, it was crushing to me, honestly. I felt like I was the worst person,” said the former student, who identifies as a conservative Christian.

The student described another teacher, who, after a student got a question wrong, slammed his books shut, stormed out of the classroom and did not return.

She said she was thankful she sat at the back of classes, because she ended up crying most days in her last years at HLS before she transferred to a local Catholic high school.

“I had great teachers while I was there, and it’s not to say the whole thing was rotten, but I just want accountability to be held,” she said. “I believe in private school. People should have the choice of school for their children. But if a school has no board of outside individuals to let there be a sense of perspective, I think that does a lot more damage than good.”

A 2019 HLS graduate described intense academic pressure at the school.

“Overall, the way that HLS impacted me was I wasn’t able to figure out who I was as a person — or really even be a person — until college, because I just had to be an academic machine,” she said.

She said she wasn’t “singled out” for mistreatment like other students she knew, but was close friends with one of the former students quoted in "The Cost of Empire."

“I want accountability as a whole,” she said. “I want current and prospective families to be aware of things that had happened and patterns that will continue to happen without the visibility and pressure from people knowing the patterns.”

Standing at the pulpit of Crescent Hill Baptist Church on Sept. 29, co-pastor Jordan Conley described church staff feeling “heartbroken” at reading The Courier Journal’s series about HLS, which has leased space from the church for more than two decades.

From the congregation, he added, he’d heard shock, confusion and people reliving their own childhood religious trauma as they read through the accounts of former HLS students.

“As we’ve listened, we have heard a shared, abiding concern for the well-being of children. And every single person who enters the doors of this sacred space,” he said. “Jesus said: ‘Who the son sets free, is free indeed.’ We expect that everyone who steps foot on this property is free from shame, free from humiliation, and free from abuse of any kind.”

As a result of "The Cost of Empire," Crescent Hill Baptist Church would take action, he told them.

“We will diligently work together to investigate the allegations we’ve heard and insist on answers,” he said. “Anything less would be a stumbling block. Anything less would undermine the spirit of God’s calling upon this place.”

Contacted by The Courier Journal for comment, Conley said: “We are heartbroken over the allegations reported in The Courier Journal and are continuing our review of our tenant relationship with HLS.”

Crescent Hill Baptist Church was kicked out of the Kentucky Baptist Convention for allowing gay marriages. It advertises itself as a diverse congregation and has a reputation as a progressive church.

One set of HLS parents, who have three children enrolled in the school, told The Courier Journal they had only positive experiences at the school.

“I’d love for the 99.5% of the people to have their voice heard, as well,” said the father. “Some of the negative stories, although they may be true — whether it’s all the way true or just partly true — one, I think they can happen anywhere. And two, I just know there's so many other positive experiences had by people that we know personally.”

Both parents asked that their names not be published.

HLS’s “more rigid” environment was a better fit for their children, they said, after some of them experienced “loud and chaotic” classrooms at Jefferson County Public Schools.

“We understand where the (HLS) leadership is coming from and what they’re trying to accomplish. And we simply had a really good experience,” said the father.

"The Cost of Empire" also caught the attention of Albert Mohler, the president of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a prominent evangelical leader.

On his podcast, Mohler called the series “basically a journalistic hit piece.”

He went on to say the newspaper “accuses” HLS and similar schools of “perpetuating Western civilization, which as it turns out, they (The Courier Journal) see as a problem rather than as a goal.”

In an opinion piece published by WORLD, a website that identifies as producing “sound journalism, grounded in facts and biblical truth,” Mohler also addressed The Courier Journal’s series.

“My guess is that this series of hit pieces in the Courier-Journal will backfire and turn out to draw even more families toward the school and others like it,” he wrote. “No school is perfect, but if you can drive the liberal establishment crazy and lead it to respond with this much fury, it’s doing something big, something important, and something worth your attention. Count on it.”

Over the years, a number of graduates of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and its Boyce College have taught at Highlands Latin. The seminary is located in Crescent Hill, the same Louisville neighborhood as Highlands Latin’s longest-established campus.

Two conservative Kentucky advocacy groups — the Kentucky Family Foundation and the Commonwealth Policy Center — also published articles critical of the series. Neither article carried an author's name.

Reach reporter Josh Wood at [email protected] or on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @JWoodJourno.