Letter to the (Sun) Editor...

To the Editor:

We respond to your publication of MHS President Johnny O’Brien’s letter, attacking our “scandalous allegations.” Mr. O’Brien does not try to refute these allegations – because they are all true. Changing the subject, he boasts that MHS is “serving more than 1,800 children.”

But this claim too is specious: stabilized enrollment was in fact 1,343 children on August 20, 2008.

Mr. O’Brien inflates enrollment figures by treating the number he cites as though it had any chance of remaining accurate beyond a day or so of the recent enrollment of 277 children. This is though 910 children have been removed from MHS over the last five years on Mr. O’Brien’s watch, in contrast with 625 children who have graduated. It is thus a certainty that a substantial number of the 277 recent enrollments will also leave, along with other MHS children, rendering the snapshot measure used by Mr. O’Brien as totally inaccurate.

Mr. O’Brien engages in this misleading enrollment math to draw attention away from our fact-based charges about the systemic failures undermining the school, under its current leadership and governance structure. MHS, of course, should measure enrollment by the number of children who stay and graduate, not by the number who enroll and leave.

Looking at the facts, stabilized enrollment growth over the last five years (after accounting for high attrition each year) is a mere 393 children. This is in spite of infrastructure expenditure during the same period of about a quarter-billion dollars coupled with approximately $100,000 annual spending per child, and for a charity valued at $8 billion! Viewed in context of these astronomical sums, increasing enrollment by a mere 393 children is gravely disappointing, not the source of boasting that Mr. O’Brien would have us believe it should be.

More troubling, the enrollment growth figure would have been nearly on a different order of magnitude at these spending levels but for woefully poor policy, increased child-crowding, plummeting employee morale, and a host of irrational decisions. Among other things, credible professionals would not have sunk $40 million on an experimental intake facility doomed to failure – nor $130 million on “renovation” of one building – nor whatever sum was spent purchasing a failing luxury golf course (to “buffer” MHS children from the community) – nor the outrageous amounts being spent on bloated executive and board compensation, and all the rest. You have to almost willfully try to spend the money that the current leadership have spent, yet still end up, five years later, with a school whose stabilized growth is a mere 393 children.

Basically, if the MHS leadership set the enrollment growth bar any lower, it would be underground.

This is why we have asked Attorney General Tom Corbett – or District Attorney John M. Morganelli, should he be the next AG – to undertake an independent investigation. This would expose the profound dysfunction plaguing MHS, and thereby finally produce the credible leadership that MHS deserves.

Needless to add, while we are accused of making “scandalous allegations” and condescendingly labeled “fellow travelers,” every statement we make is supported by rock-solid fact. The only scandalous thing about this matter is that MHS dysfunction has been permitted to continue this long, by public officials who neglect their duties. This is why we have brought the matter to the attention of District Attorney John M. Morganelli, in the hopes that the future will hold better for needy children.

Sincerely,

Protect The Hersheys’ Children, Inc.

Kenneth O. Brady, Kenneth D. Beasley, PhD, PE, George W. Cave,
Harry Chalmers, Ric Fouad, S. Lee Strayer, John P. Rice