Living the Legacy: The Untold Story of Milton Hershey School

“We saw our mom crying, she said her heart hurt.” Just nine years old, Baird Thompson remembers the night their mother Linda had a heart attack. “We had to call the ambulance and the ambulance came and they took her to the hospital,” adds his brother Oliver, sighing heavily. Both blond and soft-spoken, both confused by the tumult of their lives, the brothers appear in separate close-ups, seated on opposite sides of the screen, so you can almost feel the tumultuous void their lives became on that day.

This void was tempered when they enrolled in the Milton Hershey School, in Pennsylvania. Their story is recounted, along with those of other students, in Living the Legacy: The Untold Story of Milton Hershey School, premiering as part of the Sundance Channel’s terrific DOCDay programming on 17 May. The residential school, founded by Milton Hershey and his wife Kitty in 1909, fully funds some 1800 students at a time. Started as a home for “poor, healthy white, male orphans between the ages of 8 through 18 years of age,” the school now accommodates a more diverse population, making use of its more than six billion dollars in assets.

While the school is certainly a refuge for the Thompsons, their story is also complicated, as Cynthia Wade’s documentary shows. Their mother survived her heart attack, but bills soon overwhelmed her, depleting her savings and 401K. At the school, her boys are placed with “houseparents,” who provide a clearly structured experience, with chores, expectations, and systems of merits and demerits. The film tracks the brothers’ first year at the school from the moment of their arrival, along with that of Jerrica Bechtold, just 10 years old when her mother, a crack addict named Gail, enrolls her and her younger brother Dom in the school.

Their stories are rendered in images at once explicit and poetic, in interviews and observational footage. Oliver and Baird’s first moments on campus have them climbing a daunting set of stairs, Linda struggling to keep up and light pouring from above (with an occasionally excessive piano-based score). “Come on, mom!,” says Oliver excitedly. “The decision to send the boys to Milton Hershey was a long and hard decision,” she says, “And the opportunities they have here at Milton Hershey, I can’t give them at home.” As Oliver and Baird meet their “new parents,” the handheld camera keeps focused on the boys, so Linda and Kim and Mike Sadowski seem to loom over them, tall people making decisions that are mostly incomprehensible to their short charges.

Mike explains that he and Kim have lived at Milton Hershey for 21 years, raising three of their own kids while taking in students each year. “We’re not here to replace the parents, were here to help the parents,” he says, “This is not a job, it’s a lifestyle.” If he’s sounding like a brochure, the kids’ experiences are less neatly summed up. The film’s most compelling moments highlight how they try to sort out what’s been dealt to them, sometimes acting out, sometimes confessing their confusions directly to the camera.

The orientation assembly is cut into predictable images: a wide shot of the auditorium, to suggest the huge number of students arriving, and then a series of close-ups, children fidgeting, looking around, and even sleeping, as the speaker explains “our goals.” The camera looking up at Linda’s tearful face. “When a parent brings their child here,” says Johnny O’Brien, the school’s president and onetime student resident, “It’s a sacrifice of ultimate love.” Jerrica and her mother Gail clap for the assembly speaker, who’s been extolling the dedication of the houseparents, as Dom slouches in his pew seat, looking very small as he’s wedged in between adults and reluctant to join in the ovation.

Here the scene cuts to Gail’s interview. “I was getting high when Dom walked in,” she remembers, “I was sitting there and I was smoking, and he comes in and comes running over to me and says, ‘Give me that pipe!'” As she now acts out his gesture of grabbing at the pipe, her eyes are wet and horrified, helping you to understand how desperate she was and is. The film doesn’t show how she tries to treat her addiction, though it does include pained recollections by her mother Carol and the remarkably articulate Jerrica. During a visit home, she complains that Gail isn’t disciplining another brother, Bub. “You don’t do nothing about it, that’s for sure. You baby him like he’s nothing.” Jerrica’s lamentation is subtitled here, as the sound is muffled, but the effect is to underscore her choice of language, suggesting Jerrica’s been absorbing ideas during her journey through various domestic and institutional situations: “He is a human, he can be disciplined from his mother.”

Though she’s “venting” at her mother and brother, the film shows that Jerrica is frustrated with what seem her own lack of options. When she returns to the school, she gets in trouble, in a series of incidents off-screen. The “Student Support Team” discusses her case, wondering when “her world started to crumble,” and floating ideas about how to get Jerrica’s schoolwork and emotional life back on track. Living the Legacy offers images of her set back into the screen, framed to look small, as she gazes at the camera or out a window, sits on a grassy hillside or walks away, down a long school hallway. As instructive as it may be to hear Jerrica or her housefather describe what’s happening, such images show her turmoil and efforts to think through her next steps more allusively, and more effectively.