Documents
Another Kurn Hattin Could Happen?
Recommendations of the Joint Legislative Child Protection Oversight Committee
It became clear to the Committee as it heard testimony relating to Vermont's oversight of Kurn Hattin that the regulation and oversight of the noneducational components of residential programs are not covered under current law. The Committee recommends that the committees of jurisdiction evaluate how the Agency of Education and Department for Children and Families might coordinate to improve oversight of noneducational components of residential programs or whether one point of responsibility would be most effective. Members of the Committee also suggest that the Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate might play a role in providing oversight where there is currently a gap. If the current regulatory void persists, there is ..... no reason to believe that another Kurn Hattin could not happen.
Kurn Hattin Survivors Support Group
$25,000 Approved by Vermont Legislature
In May of 2022 the Vermont Senate and House passed Appropriations Bill H.740 for fiscal year 2023. Included in the bill is $25,000 for a proposed Kurn Hattin Survivors Support Group. The appropriation was requested by a Massachusetts law firm. According to state sources, the funds are released initially to the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services (VCCVS) and then dispersed by the third-party nonprofit to the authors of the Proposal for Kurn Hattin Homes for Children Facilitated Peer Support Group.
$1,512,636 to the Vermont Center for Crime Victims Services as follows: $25,000 for a grant to the Kurn Hattin Survivors Support Group.
The proposal outlines a plan for a total of 18, 1-hour, non-therapeutic peer support group sessions. The cost for 18 hours of groups sessions, as outlined in the proposal, is $25,000. Additional hours and sessions, if eventually included, would cost an additional $9,000.
Facilitators of the Peer Support Group are Melissa Foynes and Matthew Munich. Foynes is a yoga instructor, and Ayurvedic doula, and enjoys coloring festive holiday animal masks and has developed expertise in a diverse range of Eastern and Western healing modalities to offer women personalized paths to holistic growth and transformation. She is “on a mission to coach, empower and partner with women around the world to transform their stress, fears, self-doubt, and inner critics in order to realign with their truest inner selves.” Munich played college squash at Cornell University and coaches athletes and performers to help bridge the mental gap between where they are and where they want to go.
Presently there is no active outreach, accessible intake website, nor published public information regarding any Kurn Hattin Support Group for survivors not represented by personal injury attorneys. Only those clients represented by Massachusetts and Pennsylvania law firms engaged in pending legal action and private out-of-court reparation settlement negotiations appear to currently have access to any knowledge of, or participation in the publicly funded group. ..... Kurn Hattin Survivors Support Group Proposal
Kurn Hattin Survivor Support Consent and Group Agreement
This support group is for people who have survived harm at Kurn Hattin Homes for Children in Westminster, Vermont to have a place to connect, to offer support and encouragement related to coping, and to explore key themes common to survivors. This consent agreement explains what I am consenting to by joining the support group and agreements for my participation in the group
I consent to participate in the KH Survivor Support Group. I further consent to providing the information I filled out below to the group facilitators, Dr. Lisa Cromer and Dr. Kristen Reinhardt. I understand that this group is not group therapy but it a facilitated peer support group, a different form of support. This group is not a substitute for psychiatric care or psychotherapy or medical treatment.
I understand that Justice Law Collaborative is collecting the consent forms and will be providing administrative and technical support for these groups. I agree to allow them access to this consent form and therefore my name and contact information. Justice Law Collaborative will be storing and distributing taped educational sessions that I may be attending, and these taped sessions will be made available to other KH survivors. I understand that the educational sessions will be recorded and that if I choose to attend a live, online recorded educational session and choose to speak, that my voice will be recorded. By attending a live, recorded educational session, I am agreeing to be recorded.
Kurn Hattin Survivor Support Consent and Group Agreement Form
Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services - Facebook
Kurn Hattin Homes for Children is offering virtual Peer Support and Psychoeducational Groups! If interested, please contact Kristen at kristen@drkreinhardt.com or Lisa at lisa@sportpsychdoc.com.
Kurn Hattin Homes for Children is offering survivors peer support groups?
'Recruits for the Criminal Classes'
Woman's Kurn Hattin Association
One of the most important duties of the Christian church is to save, for the Lord, the homeless and neglected. boys and girls. An organization, called the Woman's Kurn Hattin Association has been formed to promote interest in, and raise funds for the Kurn Hattin Homes for children, who would otherwise have no home but the streets and grow up to furnish recruits for criminal classes.
The president of this Association is Mrs. Charles Albert Dickinson of Boston. Some of its friends and endorsers are:
Rev. D. L. Moody, Founder and President, Chicago Bible Institute
Rev. Francis E. Clark, President and founder of the United Society of Christian Endeavor
Rev. William J. Tucker, President Dartmouth College
Rev. E. E, Hale, Minister South Congregational Church
At the next meeting of the Woman's Union Home Missionary Society, Miss Ella L. Haskell will present the claims of this important work upon the churches of New England. A cordial invitation is extended to all who would like to hear about the Kurn Hattin Homes. The meeting will be held in the South Church lecture room, Tuesday afternoon, March 5th, at 3 o'clock. A collection will be taken. .... Save for the Lord the homeless and neglected boys
Edward Everett Hale was a Unitarian minister. Hale supported Irish immigration in the mid-19th century, as he felt the new workers freed Americans from performing menial, hard labor. In a series of letters in the Boston Daily Advertiser, he noted the "inferiority" of immigrants:
Now if we Americans, were likewise inferior in ability of such sorts to the Celts, we might complain. But this is not true. We are here, well organized, and well trained, masters of the soil, the very race before which they have yielded everywhere besides. It must be, that when they come in among us, they come to lift us up. As sure as water and oil each finds its level they will find theirs. So far as they are mere hand-workers they must sustain the head-workers, or those who have any element of intellectual ability. Then inferiority as a race compels them to go to the bottom; and the consequence is that we are, all of us, the higher lifted because they are here. This is all simple and of course. If now, into the vessel of oil, you pour water, the water floats the oil above itself.
Hale, the future Chaplain of the United States Senate, goes on to reveal his eugenical mindset:
So much for the humanity of our system. Its impolicy is as glaring. If this view of the pure Celtic race is correct, it is, at this moment, useless in the world, except, as Mr. Emerson has said, for the guano that is in it. There its value cannot be counted. But for his active purposes the Almighty has done with it. What it may have been in the past He knows, or what unseen good it has sought He knows. We can only measure it by the lower standard of visible external success. And there we can see this, that in the epochs of written history, the pure race has done nothing positive for mankind, and been nothing but a monument of failure. I cannot recall any masterwork of art, of science, of politics, of religion, or of letters which the world owes to it. Such inexplicable uselessnesses as Stonehenge; such histories as the wretched feuds of Irish Chieftains; such brilliancies as Moore's verses, or as the unconvincing and ineffective eloquence of the Irish liberals, are the fragments which it leaves behind it, a race which, in its pure blood, has done nothing. It has proved itself excellent to be absorbed. It has been of the greatest value, as a race crossed in with other races. And that is all.
Francis Edward Clark was an Andover educated minister who founded the Christian Endeavor Society along with co-founder Reverend Charles Albert Dickinson, a founder and Vice President of Kurn Hattin Homes for Children in Westminster, Vermont. Clark had strongly visceral views on immigrants, writing:
In considering the many races ... the Jews are always to be reckoned with. As in so many other countries, they are here the bankers and the financiers. The Stock Exchange, both at Vienna and at Budapest, is said to be entirely controlled by the Jewish element. In smaller places the Jews, because they have been crowded out of many professions and trades, have become the money-lenders and the usurers, the saloon-keepers and the pawnbrokers; and gradually, through the improvidence of the people, have become the landowners and, it must be admitted, often the tyrants and the Shylocks of the land. It can easily be seen how racial animosities have thus been fostered, and how through denial of rights on the one side, and shrewd and often unscrupulous dealings on the other, the hatred thus engendered has resulted sometimes in massacres and wholesale emigration to other lands.
Reverend Clark, whose Christian Endeavor teachings were proselytized at Kurn Hattin Homes, continues to enlighten readers with his insight:
I would not paint the Slovaks in too bright colors. The love of strong drink is no doubt one of their weaknesses, and in this they are inferior to their southern neighbors of Greece and Italy, who often come in the same steerage compartment. But for their intemperate habits they are not altogether to blame. In addition to their natural love for strong firewater, which they share with all Northern nations, every opportunity and encouragement is given them to get drunk on every possible occasion. The Jews, who monopolize the retail liquor business, are also money-lenders, and often have the peasants in their power as creditors, and are quite willing to have them get still further into debt for their drink bill. Yet, let it not be thought that the Slovaks are a drunken race. The emigrants from Ireland, Scotland, and Holland probably consume far more hard liquor per capita than the Slovaks, and the latter are by no means unable to appreciate the arguments for temperance which are presented to them with so much cogency when they reach America.