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Kurn Hattin choir heads out today for a week-long tour, celebrates anniversary

By JEFF EPSTEIN
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WESTMINSTER, Vt. — As it approaches its 125th anniversary Kurn Hattin Homes is organizing a national tour for its children’s choir. The students themselves are from 5–15 years old, and the residential school will celebrate its 125th anniversary by taking its children’s choir around to historic patriotic sites in a week-long “heritage tour” that begins today. 

The choir is part of the school’s musical program, and consists of about 25 students in fourth through eighth grades. It regularly performs around the region, often serving up “The Star-Spangled Banner” to appreciative audiences. Among other places, the choir performed the national anthem for a Red Sox game at Fenway Park in Boston, said Stephen Harrison, the school’s executive director.

Today the kids board a charter bus and head down to Philadelphia, followed by performances in Baltimore, Washington, Gettyburg and Hershey, Pennsylvania, New York City, and New Haven and Mystic, Connecticut.

“Nearly all the songs have some kind of patriotic nature to them,” Harrison said, to match the historical nature of the sites. Most of the performances are scheduled, but there may also be some “pop-up” performances to take advantages of opportunities, he said. The tour is an educational opportunity for the students as much as it is a performance tour.

“The concept came about two years ago,” when the school leadership and musical director Lisa Bianconi were considering ideas for the anniversary, Harrison said. Bianconi, who brought the school some attention a few years ago she when was a finalist for the inaugural Grammy Music Educator Award, thought of touring the choir on a national train journey to the California gravesite of the school’s founder, the Rev. Charles Albert Dickinson.

This original concept, similar to the whistle-stop campaign of President Harry Truman in 1948, proved to be too ambitious, said Harrison, but eventually led to today’s smaller tour.

The costs of the adventure, he added, are not coming from the school’s operating budget, but from  special fundraising.

Music has been part of Kurn Hattin almost from the beginning. Dickinson, who was born and raised in Westminster, founded the school in 1894. It now has about 90 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, said Harrison.

In addition to the choir, students can learn a musical instrument and participate in a marching band or a jazz band. The school recently held its annual jazz invitational program.

A variety of other programs are available for students as well. Kurt Hattin students reside on-site in nine cottages on campus, said Harrison. The school exists to provide a stable and safe environment for children who, for whatever reason, do not have an appropriate family home life.

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