Milton Hershey School

Milton S. Hershey, creator of The Hershey Company, was a chocolate industrialist and had founded the town of Hershey, Pennsylvania. On November 15, 1909, he and his wife, Catherine Hershey, signed over a 486-acre (1.97 km2) piece of farmland, forming the Hershey Industrial School. The school accepted "poor, healthy, white male orphans" between the ages of four and eight, allowing them to stay until the age of eighteen. The first four boys were admitted in September 1910.

In 1918, following Catherine's death three years earlier, Milton put most of his fortune—including his share of the company's stock—into a trust for the school, valued at $60 million altogether. The school grew quickly, with about 60 boys in 1915, 352 boys in 1931, and 1034 boys in 1937. Non-sectarian Christian religious training was mandatory.

In 1933, the age range for admitted orphans was expanded from 4–8 years to 4–14 years. In 1934, a junior-senior high school building was opened at the site with a capacity for 1500 students. Hershey resigned from the school's board in 1944, a year before his death. By then, the school had acquired about 10,000 acres of land. The school's name was changed from Hershey Industrial School to Milton Hershey School in 1953, reportedly to eliminate the possibility of "industrial" connoting a reform school.

Following a 1968 decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered the racial desegregation of Girard College, Milton Hershey School admitted its first non-white student. School official James E. Bobb, however, stated that the decision to admit racial minorities was unrelated to the ruling.

In 1976, the school expanded its definition of orphanhood to include "social orphans", those with single or divorced parents. In November of that year, the school successfully petitioned the Dauphin County Court on allowing girls based on their charter. The first eight girls arrived in March 1977. Female admission was gradual, first restricted to those between kindergarten and fifth grade, then in the summer of 1977 to sixth through eighth grade, and finally to all grade divisions in the summer of 1978. In October 1977, approximately 1100 boys and 60 girls were enrolled in the school; by September 1978, female students made up 10% of the 1300 students.

Cyndi Jacobsen wrote in 1989 in The Sentinel that "students chafe under the rules, the lack of privacy and individuality, and the anachronistic dairy barns... [b]ut graduates tend to look back at their experience as a survival test". She said that house parents varied widely in their treatment, with some "rigid and authoritarian" and others "warm and affirming." Later that year, the school's longtime tradition of requiring all grade 9–12 students to milk cows, twice daily, was rescinded, with strong approval from students and the board. Director of secondary education John Storm justified the change, stating that "the school revolved around the milking program, when in fact we wanted it to revolve around educational opportunities".

In 2002, the school had about 1,500 students; over the next two decades, it grew to about 2,000.

In 2010, the school settled a molestation case involving sixteen children. In late 2011, a 13 year old was denied admission to the school because he was HIV-positive. While the school initially defended its decision, citing safety concerns, an anti-discrimination lawsuit filed by the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania led to a settlement of $700,000 for the boy's family and a reversal of the policy.