The Agency of Education has decided that Kurn Hattin Homes for Children should keep its approval to operate an independent school, state officials announced late Friday.
The agency’s review was prompted by the Westminster private school’s decision in the fall to relinquish its license with the Department for Children and Families to operate a residential treatment program.
Kurn Hattin’s decision came after the department released the findings of a licensing report, which argued the school was inadequately supervising children and out of compliance with mandatory reporting and employee background requirements.
“Staff are saying that they cannot adequately meet the needs of students, children
are saying they do not feel safe, the profile to the child files reviewed are of children with complex trauma and substantial mental health needs,” DCF investigators wrote at the time.
Another catalyst for the agency’s review, according to state officials: VTDigger’s story detailing nearly 80 years of physical and sexual abuse allegations at the southern Vermont campus. The perpetrators featured in the abuse accusations from decades ago were all adult staff, but incidents spanning from 2015 to 2019 dealt with children harming one another, allegedly without appropriate intervention from staff.
Following the DCF investigation, the agency asked the State Board of Education to review Kurn Hattin’s status as an approved independent school. The board responded that such a review was actually the agency’s job, and a review team of four agency staffers and one Council of Independent Schools member began their work in January.
In a newly released 11-page report, the agency team wrote that school leaders had acknowledged failures “to implement safeguards” to ensure employees had completed the necessary background checks and to “adequately train and supervise employees on their duties as mandatory reporters.”
But the “increased scrutiny motivated (Kurn Hattin) to revise policies and procedures,” the agency’s report continued. The school reduced student-to-staff ratios and added additional oversight.
“With consistent implementation and ongoing oversight, (Kurn Hattin) can provide a safe and healthy environment for its students. Based on the evidence considered during the review, (Kurn Hattin) is playing an important role for students by providing an important blend of quality education and a responsive environment for children,” concluded the report, which was submitted May 12 by the agency’s investigator, Robert Stafford, to Secretary of Education Dan French.
“We are pleased that, after thorough investigation, both the AOE Independent Review Team and the Secretary recognized Kurn Hattin’s commitment to continuous improvement and confirmed our status as an approved independent school,” Mark Bodin, the president of Kurn Hattin’s Board of Trustees, said in a statement provided through the school’s attorney, Gary Karnedy. “Kurn Hattin serves children that our society’s institutions have failed, and we are committed to providing a positive experience for them.”
Kurn Hattin and DCF officials disagree about the reasons why the school gave up its treatment license. School officials insist that they did so of their own volition and not because of regulatory pressure from the state.
“We told DCF more than a year ago that we chose to end our license with DCF because we are not a residential treatment program,” they wrote in a letter submitted to the state board.
DCF officials, meanwhile, maintain a different version of events.
“Had they not chosen to voluntarily relinquish their residential treatment license, we would have taken it away,” Department for Children and Families Commissioner Sean Brown told the Brattleboro Reformer in September.
Brown said Monday he had only just received a copy of the agency’s report and could not yet comment.
Kim Dougherty, a Boston-based attorney who represents former students of Kurn Hattin who say they suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse while at the school, said in an email her clients were pleased that the agency acknowledged that the school had “violated statutes as it relates to failing to report abuse and failing to appropriately hire, train and supervise its employees.”
“Survivors were heard and seemingly found credible given the findings, and that is an important step in healing,” she said. “That said, it is doubtful that the policy changes noted in the report will be sufficient to ensure children’s safety. More must be done to reform the school.”
There are 47 residential and 11 day students attending Kurn Hattin, according to the state. The school’s continued status as an “approved” independent school preserves its eligibility to receive state-funded vouchers through Vermont’s town tuitioning program. Agency of Education spokesperson Ted Fisher said Monday he did not know whether any students currently enrolled at the school were Vermonters.
Private schools in Vermont must renew their approval status every five years with the state board. Kurn Hattin previously received approval in 2017, which means it will be up for regular review again in 2022.
In the interim, Fisher said the agency would conduct two additional “targeted reviews”: one in the fall of 2021 “for a required training to staff,” and another in the spring of 2022 for an “onsite visit to review procedures for background checks, supervision, and mandatory reporting to the Department for Children and Families.”
Agency staff did not visit Kurn Hattin in person but instead remotely interviewed staff, “reviewed over 3,500 documents, and directly accessed Kurn Hattin’s record’s management systems,” Fisher wrote in an email. He added that the agency’s team “could not travel to the school” because of the pandemic.
But Emily Simmons, the agency’s general counsel, said to lawmakers earlier this spring that the state’s virtual review was less about the virus than it was the narrow scope of its investigation.
“I’m sure we could have figured out Covid precautions in order to make a site visit if it were necessary,” Simmons told lawmakers during a joint hearing in March of the Senate’s education, health and welfare, and judiciary committees. The “nature of the regulations and the statutes” at play, she said, did not make an in-person investigation essential.
“We’re talking about compliance with statutes on the books and looking at procedures and protocols — that kind of thing,” Simmons said.