DEBRA SCHELL / Press And Journal
Charles Koons 2d, shown in 2008, had easy access to the students.
DERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. - The Milton Hershey School, the wealthy and nationally acclaimed free boarding school for disadvantaged children, quietly paid $3 million earlier this year to compensate for the sexual abuse suffered by five former students, The Inquirer has learned.
The school confirmed the payments in an interview Wednesday, but it would not disclose the number of recipients or the amount. Those details were provided by two sources, one of them a high-ranking school official.
"We believed what the individuals were alleging. We found it to be true, and we wanted to remediate it," said Connie McNamara, the Hershey School's spokeswoman.
The school was "brokenhearted by what happened here," McNamara said. "Frankly it's devastating. . . . We're sorry it happened. It shouldn't have happened. We have everything in place to make sure it's not happening."
The $3 million payout was discussed at the school's Board of Managers meeting in February and finalized about the same time Charles Koons 2d, a 40-year-old factory worker, pleaded guilty in Dauphin County Court.
He ultimately pleaded guilty to molesting 17 local boys in the last decade in the blue-collar towns south of Harrisburg, and a Hershey School student in 1989. Koons is serving a 35- to 100-year sentence.
The school's board is headed by LeRoy S. Zimmerman, the former two-term state attorney general. The settlement was disclosed to the board by James Sheehan, the school's vice president of legal affairs.
Koons had extraordinary access to the students at the Hershey School. His mother, Dorothy, was a relief house parent in the school's residences between 1985 and 2008, typically working every other weekend. Her son, beginning in his teenage years, accompanied her to the campus.
Koons stayed in residences supervised by his mother, watched TV with the boys, and played in the backyard with them, according to police and court documents.
The official court record and the decision by the school's leadership to pay the abused former students, or their families, are the latest major developments in an alarming course of events that stretched over more than two decades. Yet they tell only part of the story.
Koons could not be prosecuted for a Hershey School student he confessed to molesting after he was in police custody. That is because the boy had died from a drug overdose in college, said Detective David Sweitzer of the Middletown Borough Police Department, the lead investigator in the case.
Three other Hershey School students told police they were molested by Koons, but the attacks happened too long ago to be prosecuted, police and a district attorney said.
Having a serial pedophile with access to its students is a shattering blow for a 100-year-old school that considers itself a haven for children from impoverished backgrounds. The school, for prekindergarten through 12th grade, is financed by profits from the Hershey Co., and it has $7 billion in assets.
The Hershey School was the dream of company founder Milton S. Hershey and his wife, Catherine. Its campus spreads over several thousand acres and contains more than a hundred family-style student group homes supervised by house parents.
Whatever security measures the school employed, they did not prevent Charles Koons from gaining easy access to the residences when his mother was there.
Several boys complained to regular house parents about Koons in the 1980s, according to police documents. The mother of one of those boys sent a sworn statement to the Derry Township Police Department about a molestation in 1998. An investigation was launched in March 1998, and the school was contacted, according to an internal police report of the investigation.
But the case was dropped in April 1999, with a scant reference in the report to a detective and an official at the school planning to set up a meeting.
McNamara, the Hershey spokeswoman, said the school had tightened its security measures and reports all abuse allegations to police. House parents face a battery of state, federal, and private background checks when they are hired, and then periodic checks during their employment at the school.
Adult children of house parents are not checked, she said. House parents have to inform their supervisors when they have adult children - as Koons was - staying with them in a student group home, McNamara said.
The school did not have records on how often Koons accompanied his mother to the Hershey School, or complete records of the mother's work history in the 1980s and 1990s, McNamara said.
When the school learned the police were investigating her son, Dorothy Koons was "immediately placed on leave and later terminated," McNamara said.
Efforts to reach Dorothy Koons were unsuccessful.
Investigating Charles Koons did not begin at the Hershey School. He came to the attention of authorities in central Pennsylvania in April 2007, when a mother complained to the Middletown Borough police about a gangster-pose photo of her son that Koons had posted on his MySpace Internet page. The photo wasn't illegal, but police were concerned.
In October 2007, a different boy disclosed to the county's children services that a man had molested him. Sweitzer, the lead investigator, showed the boy a photo lineup. The boy identified Koons.
Based on that boy's testimony, Middletown police arrested Koons at a Hummelstown factory in April 2008. In custody, Koons quickly confessed to molesting eight boys, one of whom he knew to have died of an overdose, Sweitzer said. At the time, Koons still was not linked to the Hershey School in the investigation.
