Kanye West wanted Donda Academy students to learn to ‘carry guns’ and ‘march’, claims former teacher

SIMI VALLEY, CALIFORNIA: Kanye West, known as Ye, reportedly intended to teach children at his defunct Christian private school, Donda Academy, how to march and shoot guns, following his unsettling tirades against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Cecilia Hailey, a former teacher who has sued the rapper and her former co-workers for wrongful termination, provided additional information about her tenure at Donda Academy.

Kanye West wanted Donda Academy students to learn 'how to carry a gun'

Two former teachers from Donda Academy, Cecilia Hailey and Chekarey Byers, sued Kanye West in 2023 for allegedly being terminated wrongfully from his now-closed private Christian school.

The lawsuit also claimed that Hailey and Byers, mother and daughter, were dismissed in retribution for reporting code breaches and that they were subjected to racial discrimination by the rapper, per NBC News.

Now, in a recent interview with The US Sun, Hailey described what life was like inside the closed-off school in Chatsworth, a Los Angeles suburb, in the months following West's antisemitism controversy in November 2022.

Hailey, whose case is scheduled for trial in April 2025, said that the school was more like a "zoo" and that any opposition to Kanye's outrageous demands was met with silence.

"He did want the children to learn marching. He wanted all the children to be educated in how to carry a gun, how to shoot a gun," Hailey claimed.

She added, "I'm like, 'Are you kidding me? I'm not having my third graders out learning how to shoot rifles, absolutely not.' It came up kinda early when I first got there, kinda wanting to know how I felt about the kids learning to march, and how I felt about the kids taking gun classes and rifle classes."

"Teaching these kids to march, to be honest with you I kind of got like Hitler vibes around that or real bizarre things," the former teacher added.

Besides calling West "delusional," Hailey said, "And I don't know what he's thinking. I don't know where he thinks children fit in this. We're not talking about adults here, we're talking about eight-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, 15-year-olds."

Significant bullying problem in Kanye West's school

Cecilia Hailey also claimed there was a significant bullying issue at Donda Academy. She said that when physical altercations broke out and children were not permitted to be disciplined, she saw classmates crouching beneath tables.

She said, "There was a lot of bullying. Kids were getting physical; they would fight, the bigger kids would fight the little kids."

"So you might have a fourth grader hitting on a kindergarten or a first grader. We had kids hiding under tables because they were afraid. It was mayhem, really. There were armed guards outside, but the kids were not safe inside," Hailey added.

Kanye West and Donda Ray Academy did not respond to several requests for comment on Hailey's previous claims or the latest allegations, including marching and gun training.

Kanye West wanted to teach students how to hunt and camp

Kanye West established Donda Academy around 2022 as a memorial to his late mother, Professor Donda West. She was employed at Chicago State University for over 30 years.

A second teacher implicated in the case also told The Sun that she knew of someone Donda Academy was considering hiring to teach military and tactical abilities.

"He was going to teach the kids how to survive in the wilderness, hunting, camping, and how to load and shoot firearms," they said.

No evidence suggested that the school's students marched or trained for rifles, or that the families who had to sign nondisclosure agreements knew about the strategies.

Kanye West reportedly fed Donda Academy students only sushi

Cecilia Hailey also claimed that Kanye West abruptly decided to exclusively offer sushi to the children at Donda Academy, leaving them feeling hungry.

She said, "Initially, the kids were being given a decent meal."

"And then all of a sudden, Kanye gave them sushi every single day. We had kids that were hungry because they didn't eat sushi."

Hailey added, "So then that means from eight o'clock in the morning to five or six o'clock at night, maybe they only had fruit in the day."

"We'd just kind of sneak out and go get food for the kids because we had to. We absolutely had to because the kids were hungry."

Teachers claimed West took out the windows of the school's initial ranch facility in Simi Valley, California, leaving children shivering throughout the winter.

The rapper apparently insisted that the windows be blacked out when it moved to Chatsworth.