School Gets a New Leader Who Knows His Way Around

As a toddler, John O’Brien wasn’t dealt much of a hand. His parents disappeared -- he was told they died in an accident -- and at 3, he and his brother were taken from their hometown in rural Snow Shoe, Pa., and placed at the Milton Hershey School for orphans.

The school seemed big, the other boys intimidating. At one point, he fell off the playground monkey bars and cried, drawing the ridicule of older, bigger boys. But his house parents -- the adults with whom the boys in groups of 30 or so lived back then -- were there to pick him up.

“It was the beginning of, you know, [a realization that] there’s some people here who care about you, who trust you,” said O’Brien, 59, now with piercing eyes and a bum knee who weathered hundreds of 5:15 a.m. cow milkings and quarterbacked dozens of school football games.

O’Brien has returned as president of the school for disadvantaged youngsters, a place he calls home. As founder of an organization that has counseled executives at some of America’s major corporations on how to improve performance, he hopes to get the school back on its feet the same way that his house-parents guided him.

The administration recently emerged from stinging criticism of being aloof, and accusations by some alumni that the institution has turned into a prep school that no longer serves the neediest children and lacks the farm chores and agricultural setting that had traditionally been a part of the daily routine.

In recent years, a series of student-on-student and adult-on-student sexual assaults and sex acts at the school led to lawsuits, charges and expulsions.

And there was the near-sale of Hershey Foods Corp. in 2002, which O’Brien said would have been like “losing part of your soul” for the school.

O’Brien’s predecessor, William Lepley, was a casualty of the intense backlash caused when school trustees, including Lepley, voted to sell the trust’s majority stake in Hershey Foods, which is headquartered across town from the neatly trimmed campus. O’Brien replaced Lepley on an interim basis in December 2002, six months before he was to leave. O’Brien was inaugurated in September.

The problems, O’Brien said, resulted from the school having “drifted off” the mission set when chocolate magnate Milton Hershey and his wife, Catherine, founded it in 1909 to serve poor orphaned white boys. Hershey left much of his wealth in a trust worth $5 billion and largely is invested in the company.

These days, the school serves nearly 1,300 boys and girls of all races on a rolling, green campus that rivals the amenities at many small colleges.

O’Brien, staunchly committed to ensuring the school admit the “neediest and most alone” children, wants to bring back the tough standards and tough love that he believes sculpted his own work ethic and beliefs.

Before he graduated from Milton Hershey in 1961, he was shocked to learn that his father was still alive, but in prison for fatally shooting his mother during an argument in October 1945.

O’Brien immediately arranged a meeting. Emotionally, it was “not describable,” he said. This was “someone you know is your father but is a complete stranger behind bars.”

A decade later, he helped gain his father’s release after prevailing upon the state Pardons Board to commute his father’s first-degree murder conviction to manslaughter, according to state records. His father, he had argued, had been under the influence of sleeping pills at the time of the shooting, a point that had not been brought up at trial.

After graduating from Princeton University, O’Brien became a prep-school teacher and coach. He received a job offer as a teacher and football coach at Milton Hershey 30 years ago, but it was rescinded after he included in his acceptance letter suggestions for improving the school, he said.

With so many challenges behind him, O’Brien, a self-described “performance addict,” said he has exceeded everyone’s expectations except his own. Now he hopes to steer the school back onto what he regards as the proper path within two years.

Among the changes: toughening academic standards and conduct rules and demanding that house-parents attend more after-school events and otherwise be more active.

O’Brien takes pride in being accessible, sometimes having lunch in the cafeteria with students or visiting their after-school sports or music practices.

“They really want to know that somebody cares about them,” he said. “If I can’t remember their name, they’re devastated.”

Although some of his initiatives still are taking shape and others must be approved by the school’s board of managers, O’Brien wins credit for being fair and at least asking students’ opinions on matters such as school rules. In return, they say they’ve felt his presence already.

Asked if she’d bumped into O’Brien on campus yet, 16-year-old junior Kay Oyegun rolled her eyes and quipped, “only 5,000 times.”

His ubiquity has left the impression that he is not like previous presidents.

Students say his energy is infectious. And the adult staff have a “renewed feeling about coming to work,” Oyegun said. “They like coming here.”