This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.
In March, a Bennington Banner article caught my eye. It detailed the arrest of an employee at the residential Vermont School for Girls for sexually abusing a 15-year-old student. I wasn’t familiar with the Bennington school, which serves primarily young women in the custody of the Department for Children and Families, so I started googling. When I quickly turned up other news stories about teachers and staff there being arrested for abusing students, I thought it could be a bigger story.
My sleuthing led me to a man named Jeff Caron, who I learned ran both the Vermont School for Girls and Mount Prospect Academy, a residential program for boys in New Hampshire. The latter school, it turned out, was facing hundreds of lawsuits from current and former students who alleged physical and sexual abuse.
I struck up a correspondence with a New Hampshire reporter and enlisted him to help me get court records relating to some of those lawsuits. I also tracked down a lawyer who represented some of the victims and was willing to share details of their lawsuits.
All of this would have been enough for a meaty story. But then I found another connection that made me gasp out loud: a recent VTDigger article reporting that Caron had founded a for-profit company called the Sentinel Group, which had signed a contract with DCF in 2024 for up to $10.7 million to run a small, temporary juvenile detention facility in Middlesex and to help the state design a new one to replace the embattled Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center. The Digger story didn’t mention Caron’s connection to the Vermont School for Girls or Mount Prospect Academy.
As I wrapped up my reporting, I contacted Vermont officials to ask whether the state was aware of the issues plaguing Caron’s schools before it signed a contract with him. They didn’t answer directly, instead pointing out the complexity of running a program for youths in crisis. It appeared they were sticking with Sentinel.
What started as a potential story about wrongdoing at one small school became a larger one about the state’s role in contracting with a business owner with a concerning track record. I just had to connect the dots to write it.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Deepest Dot Connecting”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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