Tell us about your role. How did you get here?
I’ve served in virtually every department we have here at the school. I was in enrollment management, I was in our home life division—which is our boarding or residential component—I was in human resources, I was the assistant to the president, vice president for administration, and then vice president of education and student life. But my life really started here at age 5. I’m the youngest of eight children, and my father died when he was 39. And so my mother was faced with the challenge of trying to raise eight children on her own. A friend of hers knew about Milton Hershey School and encouraged her to seek enrollment for her children. And so my brothers and I came to the school. Not only am I the president, the school is in my DNA; it’s an honor for me to now lead it, and to make it even better and more effective as a home and school for the children we serve.
What do you love most about your job?
I love to talk about enhancing and promoting the school’s mission, how we’re designing new and innovative programs with our students, and really sharing the Milton Hershey story with anyone who has an interest. I leave my job most days more fulfilled than drained, and I can spend three hours with our students and go another three easily because of the energy they bring to this campus.Where do you turn for inspiration?
That’s the easy part. I could pick any one of the 2,000 students on campus now and spend an hour with them to hear their story before coming to Milton Hershey School—the challenges that they’ve experienced, or what they’ve observed. In so many cases we see a more and more complex admission application. You learn their personal stories and learn what they’ve done to get to Milton Hershey School and how they thrive in this environment where a lot of our students for the first time in their lives feel safe, feel love, feel supported, feel that they can be kids. Spending an hour or two with any individual student or a group of students gives me enough inspiration and energy to go for another couple months.What’s the moment you’re most proud of?
It would probably be the day I was named president of the school—and not because it was personal pride. In many ways, it reinforced that the difficult decision my mother had to make to allow me and my brothers to come to the school at 5 years of age was the right thing. While we have a strong partnership with our parents, she understood that she was giving up kind of the day-to-day responsibility and contact with us, and so being named president signaled to her that she absolutely made the right decision. And it was a significant pride point for her.What does leadership mean to you?
I don’t have to look very far to understand what leadership is and how it plays out when I think of Milton and Catherine Hershey, who literally made a fortune and could have spent it in a variety of ways. All they did and all they wanted to do was establish this home and school for underserved children and establish it in perpetuity. I think the Hersheys are the ultimate definition of what servant leadership is, and so with me, the leadership journey is about how we honor the founders and modify the program in the 21st century to ensure that our students are even more prepared as they graduate. How do we help students discover their unique strengths and passions? The incredible promise and hope is in the eyes of the children we serve.What’s your communication style?
Even though I had already been in the Milton Hershey School community when I became president in 2014, one of the mistakes I did not want to make was to assume that the way I know the school and experience the school was fully accurate. I spent the first year really listening to our community, to our students, to our parents, to our alumni, to our staff, and as a result, that really created what we now call our 2020 vision, which is a plan to get us to the year 2020 and how we want to focus our energy and our resources and to really inspire a community to want to get better. So I would say, most of my communication is on the listening side, and then figuring out how to translate what I’ve heard and incorporate what I believe in a way that communicates more broadly that expectation. We have multiple forums with all of our employee groups. I meet monthly with our student government body to ensure that they feel they have direct access to me. I’m very accessible.What keeps you up at night?
The biggest challenge for us is how do we continue to find—especially as we grow—the very best talent, both in our classrooms as well as our student home environments? The way our student home model is designed is a house-parent couple lives with the 10 to 12 students in each one of our student homes. We now have 165 student homes. How do we make sure that we continue to find the right kinds of role models who are interested in doing that kind of work? I try not to let anything keep me up at night, but they’re the kinds of things that we’re constantly discussing to make sure that we have the right balance.What are you currently reading/watching/listening to?
I have two sons in college right now—both in business schools—so what I usually do is read what they’re reading and try to learn along with them. I’m really trying to stretch my learning and understanding of what they’re experiencing.I’m a regular reader of The Chronicle of Higher Education because I want to make sure we’re always focused on where our students are going next and the issues that are emerging at the higher-ed level. Because we have multiple services, we really are more of a community than just a school.
I’m really learning from and reading about how larger organizations address change and how technology innovation on campuses is both positive and concerning, so I try to spend time staying focused and current on what other institutions are dealing with so that I don’t become too insular here in our community.
What’s one thing about you that few people know?
Mr. Hershey always believed that a good product would sell itself, so part of the culture at The Hershey Company back in the mid-70s was that there wasn’t a significant amount of effort put into advertising. That culture eventually started to shift and The Hershey Company came over to Milton Hershey School, and through a series of very fun processes when I was in fourth grade here, I was chosen to be in the first Hershey Bar commercial. I spent a full day at Hershey Park. I think I ate about 50 candy bars that day. Anytime I tell our students, they just can’t believe it. And then they force me to show them the commercial and laugh at how I looked. It was a wonderful experience, and it just reinforced the founders’ vision for me.If you had one more hour in your day, what would you do with it?
Professionally, I’d find ways to plug in more, and observe more of our student experience because I am kind of further and further away from their experience in the classroom and the athletic fields and the visual and performing arts. And so while I make it a part of my core schedule, I can always do more of that.Personally, being on a beach is always the most rejuvenating, and it gives me an opportunity to decompress and figure out a lot of things. I’m far away from a beach now in Hershey, but my mind drifts often to Florida [in the winter] because one more hour in a day would feel pretty nice in that sunshine. ▪
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