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CAMPUS
connection
LEFT: Seeing former G.O. Director the Rev. David Kern was a high point for many.
‘‘
Three men MADE A BIG
DIFFERENCE FOR ALL OF US – FATHER KERN, ART EDDY, AND WALTER CRAIN.
’’
RICHARD STAPLES '74, P'10,'12
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H O T C H K I S S
M A G A Z I N E
At the October board meeting, Olsen laid the groundwork for change. He suggested that the School’s longtime summer school needed new direction, writing, “For this reason I would like to have a careful survey of our summer school program with the thought of changing its emphasis and possibly coming up with a program which can have greater significance than our present program and which can also make a greater positive contribution to the total national educational scene.” With the board’s blessing and support, Olsen applied for and received a $165,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to underwrite the new program. Coincidentally that spring Hotchkiss teacher Alan Haas had corresponded with his former Wesleyan roommate, Andrew Mason. Mason, who had become an Episcopal priest, told Haas he was living in the benign island of Hotchkiss, and asked him whether he shouldn’t be doing more. The two agreed to an exchange, bringing teens from St. Ann’s Church in the South Bronx to Lakeville, and from Lakeville to the South Bronx. Reminiscing at this July’s anniversary, Haas described the event as a cross-cultural experience during which the boys bonded instantly and completely. The twin weekends could have been a footnote in each boy’s personal history except for the fact that when the Bronx group came to Lakeville, the Rev. David Kern came, too. He met Bill Olsen. The rest, as they say, is history. Olsen hired Kern to head his fledgling G.O. program. When Kern protested, saying he knew nothing about boarding schools, Olsen responded that he could teach Kern school business easier than he could teach his faculty what Kern knew about social justice and the South Bronx. The deal was sealed. The Rev. Kern moved to Lakeville in July of 1964 with his wife Peggy and children, to launch the Greater Opportunity program. Almost immediately both The Record and The Lakeville Journal interviewed him. In fact, throughout its first three years the G.O. Program attracted enormous publicity, with feature-length articles appearing in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Lakeville Journal, Brooklyn Heights Press, Hotchkiss Bulletin, and Amsterdam News. Between 1964 and 1973 the G.O program educated some 250 boys from New York City, New Haven, Bridgeport, and later exclusively from Hartford. A 1969 report on its college placement program showed that of the original 100 students, 82 went to college, with many receiving financial aid. Thirteen of the