A sweet legacy.

CANDY MAGNATE MILTON HERSHEY WANTED TO GIVE UNDERPRIVILEGED CHILDREN BETTER OPTIONS IN LIFE. NEARLY 90 YEARS LATER, THE SCHOOL HE ESTABLISHED IS STEERING STUDENTS TOWARD SUCCESSFUL CAREERS--AND ITS METHODS ARE PROVIDING FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

Hershey, Pennsylvania--the town that chocolate built--touts itself as "The Sweetest Place on Earth." It was for Randy Zerr, thanks to the Milton Hershey School.

Orphaned at an early age, Zerr was living with relatives in the Philadelphia area and running with a "pretty nasty" crowd back in 1966 when a guidance counselor talked to him about residential schools for disadvantaged youth. The ninth grader picked the one in the candy capital because its brochure had "neater pictures."

At Milton Hershey, a K-12 school with strong career and vocational programs that has served children from needy backgrounds since 1909, "they stood by me and encouraged me to keep going," Zerr says. He learned a trade, working in the school's nursery and greenhouse.

"I don't think I'd be alive today without that place," he asserts. Zerr, now a groundskeeper at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, also is an adviser to Milton Hershey's horticulture program. It's his way of giving something back.

"If there's anything I can do for the school, I will," he says.

Alan Krashesky relates a similar tale. He came to Milton Hershey as a kindergartner after his father was murdered, leaving his mother with four children to feed.

"It's difficult to imagine what life would have been like without a place like the Milton Hershey School," says the 1978 graduate, now a television anchor/reporter in Chicago. "I've often wondered what would have happened to my brother and me, roaming the streets of inner-city Philadelphia without anyone really watching us."

Krashesky, who followed a college prep track at Milton Hershey, says the school's emphasis on personal discipline, career awareness and employability skills equipped him to "make it in this world."

Current high school senior Jim Hopper, a graphic arts major, sees the same opportunities at Milton Hershey School.

"You have to do whatever you can to make yourself achieve here," he says. "They help you succeed as much as they can, but you've got to help yourself." Hopper, who envisions a career in marketing or public relations, plans to join the majority of Milton Hershey alumni--76 percent over the past six years--who go on to postsecondary study.

The school's deep pockets certainly don't hurt its efforts to guide young people toward career success. An annual budget of nearly $60 million pays for the education, food, health services and even clothing of more than 1,000 young people housed in 97 student homes; a staff of 645 full-time and nearly as many part-time employees; state-of-the-art equipment, including nearly 2,000 personal computers campus-wide and Internet access in every classroom and student home; and maintenance of a sprawling, 3,200-acre campus that includes not only the school buildings and residences but a domed administration building with a vast marble lobby, a working dairy farm and orchard, an ice hockey rink, a performing arts center, greenhouses and greenways, a fish hatchery, even a school-owned-and-operated grocery store.

But school officials insist that, resources notwithstanding, the Milton Hershey experience yields important tips for all schools--approaches to nurturing at-risk students and helping them succeed that can be replicated anywhere.

Career focus

Senior Hall, the Milton Hershey School's high school building, overlooks the roller coaster at Hershey Park in what seems a perfect metaphor. Candy magnate Milton Hershey and his wife, Catherine--themselves childless--established what was then known as the Hershey Industrial School to help impoverished orphaned boys rise above the hardships of their topsy-turvy early lives.

Today, students need not be orphans, though few come from intact families. Coeducation arrived in 1976, and all students must be of at least average academic ability and display age-appropriate behavior. But the school still targets the neediest of children--all come from households below or only slightly above the federal poverty level. Tuition and housing remain free; a trust established by the school's founder picks up the full tab.

Home life at Milton Hershey replicates the traditional family as closely as possible. Eight to 12 young people of mixed ages live in each student home and are cared for, assigned household tasks and generally kept in line by a married couple with specialized training in child care and child development who have completed the school's Houseparent Certification Program. Houseparents are described in Milton Hershey's literature as "surrogate parents--the consistent and principal advocate for each child in their care."

Students live on campus during the school year, and more than 750 stayed at Milton Hershey for at least part of last summer as well, participating in study, vocational and recreational programs ranging from one to 10 weeks. Regular communication and interaction with students' parents or legal guardians is stressed, however. Milton Hershey's extensive Family Relations Program includes an orientation day for parents, issuance of student progress reports by teachers and houseparents, special family weekends at the school, informal discussions with parents at pick-up times and breaks at home with homework instruction kits provided for parents.

The school's founding charter specified that all Milton Hershey students be instructed in a mechanical or trade occupation so they could support themselves after graduation. Milton Hershey's mission of preparing young people for life and careers remains intact today.

Career awareness starts in the elementary grades. A career education counselor helps classroom teachers infuse career awareness into the daily curriculum through such activities as classroom discussions, research projects, field trips, guest speakers and on-campus shadowing of adult employees--from custodial staff to school administrators. And older students sometimes teach the younger ones about careers. Milton Hershey's health occupations students, for instance, take children's blood pressure and show them how it's done.

Interest tests and portfolios gauge and document elementary students' preferences, and special events add spice to the career awareness mix. Vehicle Day brings flashy fire trucks and police cruisers to campus. Fifth graders show off their skills in baking, jewelry making and other jobs they've researched during an event called the Mini Society.

"Our primary intent at the elementary level is to get students acquainted with as many possible, potential avenues of careers and jobs and employment as may be out there," says Pamela Welmon, the school's director of career and vocational education.

Intensive career exploration follows in the middle school grades. Students rotate through a career education class and technology, manufacturing, and family and consumer sciences labs. There are guest speakers from area businesses and plants, and all eighth graders complete a one-day job shadow in the community. The infusion of career education across the curriculum continues as well. When students study Shakespeare, for example, they also might research writing-related careers.

One middle school research project asks students to determine how various career choices would influence their lifestyles.

"One of our middle school teachers loves to tell the story of one student who said she didn't want to be anything," Welmon recalls. "[The teacher] still had her do the research--on what it would cost to do nothing. It came out to be pretty expensive because she still had to eat, still needed a roof over her head and still needed money to pay for public transportation even if she didn't buy a car."

Introduction to Vocational Education is a required course for all Milton Hershey ninth graders. During the first semester students rotate through all seven vocational areas the school offers--automotive technology, business, carpentry, drafting, graphic arts/printing, health occupations and horticulture. In the second semester each student selects two vocational areas to study in greater depth. Coursework involves classroom activities, lab demonstrations and hands-on projects. In ninth-grade carpentry, for example, students build a shed. When a Techniques reporter toured the health occupations lab earlier this year, groups of ninth graders were solving an anatomy puzzle on the computer and identifying and placing organs in a plastic model of a torso.

About 50 percent of Milton Hershey students choose to continue in vocational education in their junior and senior years--attracted by programs that are shaped to industry standards (with input from occupational advisory panels), offer professional certification and present opportunities for real-life work experiences.

Health occupations students, for instance, are certified through the state department of education's nurse aide program and "spend almost as much time in local hospitals, clinics and nursing homes as they do sitting in our classroom," Welmon says. Carpentry students work with subcontracted professionals to build a home that people will Live in, and may complete the first year of the Associated Builders and Contractors' four-year apprenticeship program. The graphic/arts printing program recently became the first in Pennsylvania--including postsecondary programs--to be certified by the Printing Industries of America.

"I'm getting a lot of hands-on experience with patients," says health occupations student Mary Vargas, who, like all health occupations students, wears scrubs to the lab and to her off-campus work. "At Penn State (Medical Center in Hershey) we rotated through different areas. We bathed patients. We worked phlebotomy--learning about drawing blood." The senior wants to be a registered nurse.

"The school's taught us a lot of responsibility," adds horticulture student Jeff Cornielle, showing off his soon-to-be-implemented design for a section of Hershey Gardens in the town of Hershey. The junior plans to attend a four-year college and become a landscape architect.

"The programs here aren't Like at other schools where there's 40 kids in a classroom and chalkboards and stuff," says Hopper, the graphic arts student. "It's more Like, `OK, you're going to be on this project and you're on that project.'"

Career education and awareness continue to be reinforced in the high school's academic curriculum. Students might write resumes in French, for example, or chart salaries for different occupations in math class.

High school also offers opportunities for internships, volunteer assignment and part-time employment in the community during the school year and the summer months.

Dale Snyder, supervisor of animal services at Zoo America in Hershey, has overseen a pair of Milton Hershey students. One conducted behavioral research on wolves and the other helped out with educational programs.

"They were people I would trust with anything," Snyder says. "They were very interested in what we were doing here and were just trying to learn as much as they could."

At the Milton Hershey School of 1998 students gain work-based learning across the occupational spectrum--from medicine to manufacturing. But agricultural experiences always have been a particular focus at the school, and they remain so today.

Farm support

Marcia Paterson was a woman with a big mission when she came to the Milton Hershey School in 1994 from the Chicago School for Agricultural Sciences, where she had been master teacher for agriculture. In her new position as director of agriculture and environmental education at Milton Hershey, she would lead efforts to make farm-related work less of a duty for students and more of an opportunity for personal growth.

For most of the school's history students interacted with the animals and fields through farm chores that were mandatory and designed to instill a strong work ethic. They met that need, Paterson says, but "that only went so far. Kids did not make a complete connection with the kinds of opportunities and experiences and career possibilities available in agriculture and environmental education."

The result was creation of the agricultural and environmental education program, which integrates agriculture into youths' lives by involving individual students, teachers and even houseparents in projects coordinated through four staffed learning centers: horticulture, environment, animal, and dairy and foods processing. Interested parties outline their needs and goals on project planning sheets provided by AEE, then work with AEE staff on implementation.

"We facilitate hands-on, age-appropriate projects that are linked to agricultural and environmental experiences," says Paterson. "Then we add into that leadership skills, personal growth and career opportunities. On any given day my staff members could be working with a third-grade teacher, a 10th-grade science teacher or a houseparent."

A seventh-grade science teacher might contact the environmental center to shape a project on plant classification, for example, while third graders might learn how to make maple syrup through the same center. Houseparents, meanwhile, might propose a public service project for the students under their care, such as picking apples to bring to a local mission. In that case, Paterson says, the houseparents and AEE staff might fashion a project requiring that students also research apple-growing techniques and marketing, draw up a budget and write a "reflection piece" on the experience.

AEE also offers four- to 10-week paid summer internships that students design themselves. One youth worked as a beekeeper last summer, for example. Another conducted an experiment designed to increase cows' milk production.

"We support all the different programs. We're part literacy, part research, part education," Paterson says. "We kind of pull all that together. And we don't hear, `Why am I learning this?' from students anymore."

Keys to success

Both Welmon and Paterson come from public school vocational education backgrounds and admit to feeling a bit like kids in a candy store--if you'll pardon the expression--at the Milton Hershey School. Not only is the place well funded, but its history and culture are such that, in Welmon's words, "you don't have to stand on a soapbox and try to persuade everyone that vocational education isn't closing doors, but opening them."

They argue, though, that a school or vocational program needn't be flush with cash, have a residential component or be a darling of the administration to effectively reach at-risk students. They offer the following guidelines for success:

* Limit class size. Milton Hershey limits classes to 15 students. More individualized instruction enhances learning and communicates, Welmon says, that "there are no throwaways--that every student must succeed."

* Coordinate instruction. Career counselors and AEE activities at Milton Hershey promote the coordination of career information among the grades, showing students how what they're learning will be used in subsequent grades and in careers. Better communication among elementary, middle school and high school teachers makes learning relevant and keeps students interested, school officials advise.

* Emphasize applied, problem-based learning. "In many locations students are at risk, in part, because they lack access to opportunities to expand their learning, knowledge and skills," says Mavis Kelley, the Milton Hershey School's senior vice president. When AEE students learn how to stabilize a stream bank, for instance, they not only gain knowledge but heightened self-esteem and problem-solving skills.

* Stress staff development. All Milton Hershey employees--from bus drivers to houseparents to top administrators--are required to complete 40 hours of training annually in such areas as diversity, time management and communication. And the school strongly encourages additional training. School districts that reduce staff development to cut costs "disarm their forces," Welmon says. "You're telling them it's their job to make the child successful but you're not giving them the tools they need to do it."

* Get business and community colleges fully involved. They are invaluable sources of equipment, training sites, internships and mentors. "It's not just the resources you [physically] have, but using all the resources out there," Welmon advises.

* Send praise home. Paterson encourages her staff to tell students' parents and houseparents the things "your child did today that was really wonderful." All students--but especially at-risk youth--need positive reinforcement at school and at home, she notes.

* Create a "culture of caring." There's no magic formula for this, but it's a combination of following the preceding steps and communicating in subtle ways at all levels of the school staff that "failure is not an option," in Welmon's words. Outside the classroom, nurturing efforts at Milton Hershey include special training for houseparents and a "visitors" program that encourages adults from all walks of campus life to befriend and/or mentor students.

* Learn from others. Milton Hershey staff regularly visit other schools to see what they can learn from their practices and programs. Conversely, "There are many aspects of our program that people could replicate, depending on their needs," Kelley says. She encourages vocational educators and others to contact the Milton Hershey School to find out more.

The big picture

The Milton Hershey School is hurtling toward the millennium with a host of new plans and initiatives that may make the place look more like Candyland than ever to programs struggling along with public education money and fighting public education battles. A computerized "MYPLAN" will soon debut to track and monitor each Milton Hershey student's goals and progress. The latest thinking on vocational-academic integration is driving the design of a new high school slated for completion in 2000. Three different greenhouses in the recently dedicated horticultural center will each offer their own age-appropriate learning activities.

Milton Hershey officials insist, however, that the big story here isn't what a school can accomplish with a big trust fund. Rather, they say, it's that anyone who thinks students labeled "at risk" can't ever quite get past the roller coaster had better think again.

"There is a generically accepted mindset that students who come from certain beginnings will only ever achieve but so much," Welmon notes. "Well, I think the story being told here is that that is absolutely not the case. We are having the kinds of successes we are having with students who are very, very, very needy. And we're not doing anything that cannot happen successfully in the public schools if resources are directed [wisely] and a level of intolerance for failure is communicated from the top down. That's the real lesson"

RELATED ARTICLE: Milking It for All It's Worth

Amanda Estep and Jennifer Rolfsema are typical of their peers at the Milton Hershey School in key respects. Both weathered economic hardship and family upheaval on their way to the school, and both have taken full advantage of the opportunity to pursue their career dreams.

Reflective of the school's desire to accommodate each student's specific career interest, the two seniors are preparing to embark on very different paths. Rolfsema, foreseeing a future as a graphic artist, is applying to such post-secondary leaders as the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Rhode Island School of Design. Estep, who has found her niche milking and breeding cows, declined a college scholarship offer and will go straight from school to work on a local farm.

"The school came at a perfect time for me because my parents were separating, I'd have had to change schools and the school I was going to wasn't that great," says Rolfsema, an 18-year-old from Massachusetts who came to the Milton Hershey School as a sophomore. "I had never even heard of graphic arts until I came to this school. This is the ideal opportunity for me because I've always wanted to have a creative outlet and there are so many different ways you can express yourself in the graphic arts field."

Leading a tour of the school's well-equipped graphic arts lab, Rolfsema takes time out to proudly display some of the many posters, theater programs and other items she has designed for the school--and her certificate from the Printing Industries of America. She already has successfully completed introductory-level training through Milton Hershey's PIA-certified graphic arts/printing program and hopes to be PIA-certified in desktop publishing and electronic imaging by the time she graduates.

"This is a really good thing for me," she says. "It shows that I'm familiar with the terms and equipment of the field and that I know how to get around--from starting a project to finishing it." Rolfsema also has completed internships with a local ad agency and a trade show planner.

Estep, a native of central Pennsylvania, came to the Milton Hershey School in the third grade after years spent shuttling among relatives and between schools. "It got real hard after a while," she says. While Milton Hershey's nurturing yet disciplined atmosphere helped stabilize her life, Estep entered high school with only a vague career plain--to somehow work with animals.

"All we had was an ag science program when I got interested in the dairy; there were no internships or independent studies," she notes. "But I decided I wanted to try it and I knew they couldn't teach me how to milk cows out of a book." She pled her case to school officials, who helped her fashion an independent study on the school's farm, gave her a part-time job milking the school's cows after classes, financed her training as a certified breeder and even loaned her the wheels to take a weekend job she had sought out at a local farm.

Despite a scholarship offer from Penn State, Estep, 17, will soon make her weekend job a fur-time occupation. While conceding she hasn't permanently rued out college, for now she'd rather be milking.

"I love it," she says. "It's a job where you can care for an animal, see the way nature is, see the way life is and just realize there's no point in sweating the small stuff when there's all this beauty around you. And I'm helping to feed the world, in a sense."

Estep, who favors muddy overalls and finds classrooms confining, adds, "There's always going to be a job for me." Financially strapped farmers are badly in need of versatile workers, she notes, and her status as a certified cow breeder "will really help me."

Both young women laud the school's creativity and flexibility in helping students explore a wide variety of careers through internships, independent studies and other hands-on activities.

"A lot of times I've asked to do things that nobody at the school has tried before, but we've just gotten together and kind of winged it," Estep says. "And it really has worked."

For additional information on the Milton Hershey School, call [phone] or visit the school's Web site at www.hershey.pvt.k12.pa.us.