A Philanthropy Built on Chocolate Expands its Mission to Support Early Childhood

Chocolate is the Hershey family’s most celebrated commodity, but Milton Hershey, the so-called “Henry Ford of chocolate,” left behind another legacy, as well: a school that carries his name. The Milton Hershey School, based in Hershey, Pennsylvania, provides pre-K through 12th grade education to children from lower-income families. 

Now, the Hershey Trust, the philanthropy behind the school, is expanding its mission to very young children — ages six weeks through four years — with its Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning (CHS). Just last month, CHS celebrated the grand opening of the first of these schools, also in the family’s hometown of Hershey. 

The new early childhood schools will be a little different than the Milton Hershey School, where students live on campus and all their costs are covered, including food, clothing, school supplies, and health, mental health and dental care. Students won’t live at the CHS schools, but all costs will be covered, along with comprehensive, on-site services for children and families. The Hershey Trust’s $350 million initiative will establish a total of six schools, all located in Pennsylvania’s tri-county region. 

By expanding its focus to include younger children, Hershey is acknowledging something a number of other funders have in recent years — the importance of quality early childhood education (ECE) and its life-long impact on growth and development. As IP pointed out in our report, Giving for Early Childhood Education, ECE has long received a fraction of the philanthropic support provided for the K-12 education sector. Several funders, however, have increased their giving in this area, as advances in research on brain and child development have demonstrated that it’s critical to address the needs of children as early as possible, even before birth. While ECE funding still lags far behind that for K-12 education, a number of philanthropies — from stolid supporters like the Annie E. Casey, Ford and Kellogg foundations, and Pritzker Children’s Initiative, to newer tech funders like the Ballmer Group, the Einhorn Collaborative and MacKenzie Scott — are investing in an array of approaches to early childhood. 

For administrators at the Milton Hershey School (MHS), broadening its focus to include younger children was an obvious response to what it was observing among its incoming students. 

“We enroll children in Milton Hershey School as young as age four, and the needs of those children were becoming more and more pronounced,” said Pete Gurt, president of both MHS and CHS. “It was obvious to us that, given what we now know about the importance of brain development and how it starts even prior to birth, as well as in the earliest years — we were seeing more and more at MHS that these issues had to be addressed even earlier.”

A comprehensive education model

The origins of the Hershey Trust sound like something out of a children’s tale. Chocolate magnate Milton Hershey and his wife, Catherine, loved children but were unable to have any of their own, so they decided to use the wealth from their chocolate empire to help young people. They created the Hershey Industrial School, a home and school for low-income, orphaned boys, in 1909.

“Well, I have no heirs — that is, no children,” Milton Hershey told the New York Times in 1923, “So I decided to make the orphan boys of the United States my heirs.” 

The school would later expand to enroll girls as well as boys; it was renamed Milton Hershey School in 1951. The school was the main recipient of Milton Hershey’s fortune when he died in 1945. Today, over 2,100 students attend MHS.

Students at MHS and CHS all come from low-income families. The Milton Hershey School has always been about more than academics, providing services and supports to meet the needs of the whole child, in an approach that resembles the community schools model. The Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning will also address student needs by providing medical and dental care, and early intervention services, as well as meals and transportation, in some cases. It will also offer support for families.

“One of the components of our model is its generational impact,” Gurt said in a recent interview. “CHS won’t be just working with the children at our centers, but doing everything from boosting parenting confidence to helping with job placement. That might mean working with employers in our area to give parents job and employability skills so they can then earn a family-sustaining wage. So the model is extraordinarily comprehensive.”

Each of the new Catherine Hershey Schools will have a Family Success Center, and each family will be assigned a family success advocate, according to CHS Executive Director Senate Alexander. “The family success advocate’s role is to support families and to connect them to local resources,” Alexander said. “The way we think about it, we’re not planning to just hand parents off to someone else. Our job is to say, ‘Hey, we’re here to walk alongside you.’”

“It literally changed my life forever”

Andrea Elliott’s 2021 book “Invisible Child,” follows Dasani, a girl from a homeless family who leaves New York City at 13 to attend the Milton Hershey School. In a New York Times article adapted from the book, Elliott includes this description of MHS’s amenities, which she compares to that of a top university:

“…eight tennis courts, three indoor pools, a 7,000-seat football stadium, an ice-skating rink. Hershey pays for braces, birthday presents, piano lessons, tutoring, therapy and other privileges known to families of means. The school has its own hair salon, clothing center and 24-hour health clinic with staff pediatricians. Before graduating, all students must learn to swim, drive a car and manage a bank account. Those who have kept up their grades and followed the school’s strict rules are given a college scholarship of $95,000.”

Dasani doesn’t end up staying at MHS (she was expelled after several disciplinary incidents), and Elliott explores the conflict many children face when they are torn between two very different worlds. But for other young people, including Senate Alexander and Pete Gurt, who both graduated from MHS, attending the school was transformative. Alexander’s mother was a single parent, and the family was struggling when he started at MHS at the age of nine. He says that attending MHS “saved my life and just put me on a whole different life trajectory.” Gurt started to MHS at the age of five, after his father died, leaving his mother to raise eight children on her own. He says of the school, ”It literally changed my life forever.”

New heights

Today, the Milton Hershey endowment tops $20 billion. Over the years, the Hershey Trust has been criticized for not spending more of this vast wealth, including in an in-depth 2021 report by the Philadelphia Inquirer, Spotlight PA and ProPublica. That report contends that Hershey launched the new preschool initiative, at least in part, in response to pressure to use more of its resources to help more low-income children, as Milton Hershey intended. According to the report, even though the six new preschools will be a significant investment, that investment represents only a fraction of Hershey Trust resources.

Still, no one would argue that new early childhood schools — particularly those that provide comprehensive care for low-income families at no cost — aren’t a good thing. The U.S. faces a serious child care crisis: a perfect storm of high operating costs, rising tuition, vanishingly low educator salaries and a scarcity of educators, put quality early care out of reach for too many families.

Because of its formidable resources, Hershey’s new early childhood centers don’t present a model that could be scaled to address the child care crisis as a whole. At the same time, Hershey’s comprehensive approach could provide valuable information for others in the field, including advocates and political leaders pushing for a national system of early care.

Indeed, Hershey hopes the new Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning will provide lessons that can be used more broadly, and they intend to track their progress every step of the way. 

“In addition to our daily work, we have committed to a rigorous research and evaluation process,” Gurt said. “We have engaged the University of Pittsburgh, which we refer to as our local evaluation partner; they’re going to be embedded in each of our Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning to give real-time feedback to the staff and to families about areas of growth and strategies that are working, and continuously brainstorming possibilities for improvement. Every day in each center in every classroom.”

Another Hershey partner will be conducting a longitudinal study. “Our goal is to be very transparent about what we learned, both in terms of outcomes as well as strategies to inform the field about what we are doing well and what we’re still struggling with,” Gurt said. “We believe that CHS will make a powerful contribution to the national conversation, even though our funding stream is unique.” 

Hershey is also working to build a stable workforce community at its new early childhood centers, and will provide competitive salaries and ongoing professional development. In addition, CHS educators were brought on staff a year before the first facility opened. 

“We made a commitment to bring on the staff a year in advance, before the center opened, so we could provide them the absolute best professional development in terms of strategies and skills,” Gurt said. “So they are ready, they are really ready to get kids in front of them. And not only are they prepared from a skill set perspective, but that year together gave the team a chance to grow their culture and to learn from one another.”

Unlike many philanthropists who never see the results of their giving, Milton Hershey lived for several decades after his school was established, and by all accounts, was deeply involved with the children there. ProPublica’s report includes interviews with two men who attended MHS and knew Milton Hershey. Both believe he would want his fortune to be helping even more young people. “Mr. Hershey took care of me,” one said. “I feel an obligation that other children should have the same opportunity that I had.”

As Hershey himself put it in 1934, “When I started the school 25 years ago, I had no idea what would happen. I thought if it grew to provide for a hundred boys, it would have been a good job. I hope to see the school carry on to new heights.”