Journalist has few sweet words for Hershey School in new book

NEVER underestimate the power of a journalist's instinct.

In 2001, Philadelphia Inquirer business reporter Bob Fernandez was sent out to Hershey to get the "local angle" on a big, global story - the use of slave labor in the cocoa fields of West Africa that benefitted big chocolate makers, like the Pennsylvania-based Hershey Co.

On that assignment, he recalled, he was surprised to learn that a controlling interest in the chocolate business still belonged to a trust that founder Milton Hershey had established in the early 20th century to pay for a boarding school for Industrial Revolution-era orphans. It was information that Fernandez filed away in his brain.

Five years later, Fernandez returned to Hershey, about 90 minutes west of Philadelphia, to report on what ultimately proved to be an unsuccessful bid for the chocolate company, and he swung by the sprawling campus of the Milton Hershey School, repurposed for the 21st century to provide a free education to underprivileged kids.

"Something seemed strange to me," Fernandez said. He went inside the school and trekked through the massive circular, flag-ringed Founders Hall - and didn't see any kids. He tried calling school officials to get more information for his short article but wasn't getting his questions answered. Now, the Milton Hershey School - with powerful board members like former Gov. Tom Ridge and former state Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman - was on the reporter's radar screen.

Some 14 years after that first article, Fernandez, after a string of scoops in the Inquirer that was fodder for a state investigation, has written a book that seeks to tie together the strange saga of a school that few outside of Pennsylvania have heard of - even as it carries an endowment of roughly $12 billion that would make even some Ivy League colleges jealous.

The Chocolate Trust, published this week by Philadelphia-based Camino Books, is the first comprehensive history of the Milton Hershey School, its iconoclastic industrialist founder and the politics and patronage that often guided, or misguided, affairs at the school after Milton Hershey's death in 1945.

Pulling no punches, Fernandez's tome looks not just at corruption but allegations of sexual abuse, poor student care and low academic achievement, as well as the child-slavery allegations in Africa that had aroused his interest in the first place. That a trust established to educate orphans would be linked to child-labor abuses halfway around the world is one of many ironies in a book that is chock full of them.

"Hershey presents itself as a family-friendly brand, and the corporation presents itself as a highly responsible corporation," said Fernandez, recounting his reporting on the trust and its inflated $17 million purchase of a golf course partly owned by a board member. "The facts in this book don't support that view."

The spokesman for the Milton Hershey School, Lisa Scullin, lashed out at Fernandez's book as "a deliberately negative and one-sided portrayal of our school" that she alleged was larded with inaccuracies, such as using outdated numbers on student retention and ignoring top ratings for student growth on the Pennsylvania Keystone Exams.

"Milton Hershey School and the Hershey Trust that runs it are not perfect," Scullin said, via email. "Our work is very difficult. But the arc of Milton Hershey School's 100-plus years is a story of historic success in giving generations of children from low-income families a chance to break free from the vicious cycle of poverty and reach their full potential."

It could be argued that the Milton Hershey School itself is an accident of nature; when the turn-of-the-20th-century candy baron and his wife, Kitty, were unable to have kids, Milton Hershey developed a plan in 1910 to funnel his growing fortune into a trust that eventually took a controlling interest in the chocolate company. But the trust also financed his dream of a kind of trade school for orphaned white boys, in the era when large institutions, not foster care, were the norm for kids growing up without their natural parents.

Fernandez writes in The Chocolate Trust that the arrangement was less romantic than it might have sounded - in fact, a form of indentured servitude, in which the youths were expected to pay off their schooling by difficult labor. He explains that "the fatherless orphan boys who enrolled with the Hershey Industrial School would be expected to work hard: milking cows, shoveling manure, pitching hay, picking strawberries and potatoes, and cleaning turkey coops on Hershey-owned dairy farms. Milton Hershey, who had been apprenticed in his early teens, claimed that the indentures allowed him to raise the boys without mothers or other family members interfering."

There are echoes here of other Pennsylvania wealth battles - including 19th-century millionaire Stephen Girard, whose Girard College was the site of an epic integration battle 50 years ago this summer, as well as the controversy over the priceless artworks of the Barnes Foundation.

"But you're dealing with kids," Fernandez noted, "and not artwork hanging on a wall."

After Hershey died, the trust's millions grew to billions even as its mission of orphaned kids learning to become factory workers became badly outdated. Fernandez argues that by the early 1960s, the trustees grew more political and more concerned about promoting Hershey and building a medical center there than about schooling poor kids.

The reporter developed a network of whistleblowers among alumni and former staff of the school, which had gradually transitioned into a boarding school for kids looking to escape poverty. He notes that despite spending in the ballpark of $100,000 per year for every kid the school educates, the results are underwhelming. In 2011, he writes, the average SAT scores at the Hershey School were 515th out of 648 public and charter schools in Pennsylvania, and official noted that graduates were not faring particularly well in college, either.

Indeed, cronyism among the board, as reported by Fernandez, seems less shocking than other issues of haphazard child care. Some cases - such as Charles Koons II, a serial molester who gained access to the campus in the 1990s through his mother, a part-time house parent - had been previously widely reported. But the book goes into wrenching detail about the case of Abbie Bartels, a troubled 14-year-old who was barred from attending her eighth-grade graduation and who shortly afterward committed suicide.

To the author, the solution for the woes of the Milton Hershey School is fairly simple: Separate the school from its entanglements with other arms of the Hershey empire and replace the politically connected with a board of professional educators.

Until then, said Fernandez, "The kids seem to be last. It's what's good for the town, what is good for the leaders of the trust and the local politicians . . . and then come the kids."

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