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Students from Crotched Mountain School kayak on Sunset Lake in Greenfield. -
Students at Crotched Mountain School play basketball in the school gym. -
Students at Crotched Mountain practice kayaking in the recently refurbished Olympic-size pool. The school hopes to reopen the pool to the public soon. -
Students from Crotched Mountain School learn to kayak at Sunset Lake. -
Students and staff ride bikes on the accessible trails at Crotched Mountain.
Crotched Mountain School in Greenfield, a program of the Seven Hills Foundation, has reached a significant benchmark, more than doubling the number of students enrolled at the campus in the past two years.
“We have just enrolled our 55th student, which is really exciting for us,” said Deborah Tighe, director of development for Crotched Mountain School. “We now have 30 residential students and 25 day students.”
The school serves children and young people from ages 5 to 21 with second- and third-tier special needs, including students requiring 24-hour residential care. The maximum capacity of the school is 105. Tighe said building student enrollment was “mostly put on hold” for the past few years as Seven Hills made needed repairs to the campus.
“We needed to get everything up to scratch before we could start to build our enrollment,” Tighe said.
In 2020, Gersh Autism Academy, a for-profit provider of services and educational support for students on the autism spectrum, purchased the former Crotched Mountain Foundation school campus. In 2022, Gersh, which had never previously operated a residential facility, lost its license to operate Crotched Mountain School. Then-Gov. John Sununu reached out to the Massachusetts-based Seven Hills Foundation to see if the organization would have interest in taking over the school, which has served New Hampshire children with special needs since 1953.
The transition from Gersh to Seven Hills happened as quickly as possible to avoid disruption for the students still in residence at the school.
“We were here just 19 days after the sale. We had our licensing up and running; we had staff in place,” Tighe said. “We really needed to focus on our campus for several years first before we could start to bring enrollment up, and we are thrilled that we have reached the point where we are able to finally bring more students in.”
Seven Hills already had a connection to Crotched Mountain School, as David Jordan, CEO of Seven Hills, was president of the Crotched Mountain Foundation from 1985 to 1995.
“Our CEO, David Jordan, knew the potential was here, and he believed we could bring the school back to what it once was, and provide desperately needed care for the children of New Hampshire and New England,” Tighe said.
According to Tighe, Seven Hills receives 10,000 referrals for children with special needs each year. The organization operates dozens of day programs, residential care and behavioral health facilities throughout New England.
“We can only serve a fraction of the children who need care; there are just not enough providers for these children. The public schools cannot provide adequate services for the children with high and complex needs,” Tighe said.
Seven Hills received a matching $6,483,000 ARPA grant for Crotched Mountain School in 2023. So far, Seven Hills has invested $21 million in restoring the 125-acre campus. Most of the land surrounding the school, including accessible trails, is still owned and maintained by the Crotched Mountain Foundation, now based in Manchester.
“The infrastructure here was all from the 1950s. In the past few years, things had just been extremely neglected. A lot of the housing was uninhabitable; the group homes were literally falling apart. Our first priority was to provide safe and comfortable housing our students and for our staff,” Tighe said.
Currently, 50 staff members reside on campus. Crotched Mountain School was for decades the largest employer in Greenfield.
Major projects on campus included repairing the district heating pipe, addressing noncompliant fuel storage, getting wastewater distribution into compliance, replacing the campus fire alarm system, recertifying the wood-chip processing system, including boilers, and renovating the Health Center, which had been damaged by flooding.
The school also partnered with the Greenfield Fire Department to use one condemned building, the former day care center, for a training burn in 2023.
“All our elevators failed inspection and had been shut down by the Department of Labor. Most of the air conditioning had failed; most buildings on campus needed a new roof,” Tighe said. “We were really faced with with a mess.”
Tighe said she receives frequent inquiries about the school’s two indoor swimming pools.
“When we got here, neither the therapy pool or the Olympic pool were operating. The Olympic pool had two feet of brown water in it,” Tighe said.
The larger pool is now up and running, while the therapy pool, which has a floor that can be raised and lowered for accessibility, is awaiting repairs.
“We are just waiting for one piston which we need to get the therapy pool working again,” Tighe said. “We’re hoping we can open the big pool to the public sooner rather than later. Right now, it’s being used by our students, and it is really wonderful to have that resource.”
Crotched Mountain School is also slowly restoring community programs such as CMARS, the adaptive sports program that the Crotched Mountain Foundation ran for decades.
“CMARS had left probably $100,000 of adaptive sports equipment here on campus, but the previous owner took all of it, so it has been slow getting the adaptive sports program up and running again,” Tighe said.
The school recently received a grant from the Kingsbury Foundation to purchase adaptive bikes.
“We are so grateful for all the support we’ve received, and from the community, the region and the town,” Tighe said. “We are making great strides every day.”
For information about Crotched Mountain School, go to sevenhills.org/shnh.