Alumni Denied Right to Challenge School

Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has ruled that the Milton Hershey School Alumni Association has no legal right to challenge in court decisions made by the school, reports the Harrisburg Patriot-News.

The unanimous ruling—which overturned a lower court’s ruling that the alumni association did have the right to sue—clarified which groups can challenge decisions made by charitable trusts, such as the $5-billion one that provides money to the Milton Hershey School.

Pennsylvania’s attorney general is legally responsible for overseeing the trust, and attorneys general in several states had filed briefs urging the court to deny the alumni association the right to challenge and to keep the definition of who can challenge quite narrow.

Lawyers for the 5,500-member alumni association had argued that the group had sufficient interest in the operations of the school, which educates orphans, to warrant granting it the legal right to sue, a status the association had been seeking since 1999.