A 13-year old HIV-positive honor student has been denied admission to one of the nation’s oldest, richest, and most-famous private schools because he is HIV-positive. The Milton Hershey School, founded by the man whose candy conglomerate sells bazillions of Hershey chocolate bars every year, admits the teen’s HIV status as the reason for denying him, and claims they are doing it as part of a policy to deny admission to students with chronic communicable diseases. The teen is now suing the school.
No word on whether the school denies admission to applicants with other chronic communicable diseases.
The teen’s name has not been released to protect his privacy.
The school was founded to help low-income students (albeit, only caucasian students), often children of families who worked for Hershey in his Pennsylvania plant, and began accepting students in 1910. Today, thanks to the original grant from Hershey, the school has assets of over six billion dollars. Ironically, Hershey’s wife suffered from an undiagnosible disease the decade before the school’s opening, and the school was founded to be one that “nurtures and educates children in social and financial need to lead fulfilling and productive lives.”
Just, apparently, not all children. Like, HIV-positive children.
Which is not to say that the school has not done a great deal of good in the past century, and, in fairness, the school claims it was going to invite a federal court to weigh in, but instead released a statement that says it made the decision “after careful review and analysis,” and because, “Milton Hershey School is not a day school, where students go home to their family at the end of the day. Instead, this is a unique home-like environment, a pre-K to 12 residential school where children live in homes with 10 to 12 other students on our campus 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Which, still, doesn’t qualify as a reason to deny the teen admission.
Read below the school’s entire statement, and watch the news report from NBC’s Philadelphia affiliate.
Today, Milton Hershey School had planned to file a request in federal court asking the court to review our decision to deny enrollment to a child who is HIV positive because of concerns for the health and safety of our current students.
We had been in discussions with the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, which is representing this 13-year-old boy. Recognizing the complex legal issues, the School was preparing to ask the court to weigh in on this matter. Unfortunately, attorneys for the young man took the adversarial action of filing a lawsuit against the School.
The decision to deny enrollment was a challenging one for us to make. Like all our enrollment decisions, we need to balance our desire to serve the needs of an individual child seeking admission with our obligation to protect the health and safety of all 1,850 children already in our care.
Attorneys for this young man and his mother have suggested that this case is comparable to the Ryan White case. But this case is actually nothing like the Ryan White case. Milton Hershey School is not a day school, where students go home to their family at the end of the day. Instead, this is a unique home-like environment, a pre-K to 12 residential school where children live in homes with 10 to 12 other students on our campus 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In order to protect our children in this unique environment, we cannot accommodate the needs of students with chronic communicable diseases that pose a direct threat to the health and safety of others.The reason is simple. We are serving children, and no child can be assumed to always make responsible decisions which protect the well-being of others.
That is why, after careful review and analysis, we determined we could not put our children at risk.
Housing and educating an HIV-positive teen does not put other students at risk.
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