Mitch McConnell's Daughter Claire: the Apple that didn't Fall Far From The Twisted Tree

McConnell's daughter's abusive teaching record in Ghent New York and

McConnell, the turtled octogenarian, if he is actually alive and has a future, might be worth looking at through his past. Not just the horrifying damage he did to the United States and the Supreme Court, but closer to home.

While many of us look at him and think when he dies the evil will go with him, it won’t. Even if he is already gone, the monster will live on in his spawn. Yikes! I know the mind’s eye is hurting just imagining Mitch getting some. But he did breed and whatever that rogue gene is that controlled him, it made it to his offspring, specifically, his daughter Claire. And like most virulent diseases she carried the McConnell culture far past the Mason-Dixon Line all the way up to Ghent, New York.

For those of you who read my local reporting on Columbia County and the town of Chatham, Ghent is the immediately adjacent town. It was in the capacity of my local writing that a reader asked me to look into Mitch’s daughter Claire. I was shocked at what I read.

The Waldorf Schools

Waldorf schools are a private education movement founded in 1919 by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, in Stuttgart, Germany. The first one was opened for the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, which is where the name comes from. It’s now one of the largest independent school movements in the world, well over a thousand schools plus a larger number of kindergartens, concentrated in Germany but spread across North America and Europe. In the United States they’re often called Waldorf or Steiner schools interchangeably.

Some say they’re progressive. Others say the lack of clear academic standards, the absence of testing, and now fewer vaccinated children than most schools make Waldorf a disservice to children. It is also expensive; the top grade at Hawthorne Valley is more than twenty thousand dollars.

As in all private schools, teachers are not regulated the way they are in public schools. It is a cruel irony, at least in this one case, that parents didn’t get what they paid for. Hawthorne Valley, like all Waldorf schools, is not associated with corporal punishment and the restraint of children. But then again, most of these schools don’t employ a McConnell.

In July 2003, the Albany Times Union reported that more than a dozen parents had pulled their children out of the Hawthorne Valley School. The reason was Claire McConnell. At the time her father was the senior senator from Kentucky and, that summer, the second-ranking Republican in the United States Senate.

The Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School Campus | Credit Hawthorne Valley School Website

The reason they had pulled their children out was twofold: Claire was physically abusive, and the administration did nothing about it.

Just what did Claire do? One child (second grade) got out of his seat too often, so Claire took a belt and strapped the child to the chair. Another child was too handsy, so she tied her hands behind her back. And you guessed it, when a child talked out of turn, she taped the child’s mouth shut.

Bob Wohlfeld and DeeAnn Veeder’s daughter was tied to her chair when she would not settle down. They removed her after she finished second grade. “We were a little dumbstruck,” Wohlfeld told the paper.

When the Times Union reached out to Claire, she went silent. Much like her father right now. And like her father, she put her response in writing.

In a letter dated June 24, she apologized. She called it a disciplinary misjudgment and asked forgiveness. A misjudgment is gas station sushi. These were not one-offs. This was Claire’s pedagogy.

Her supervisor and mentor at Hawthorne Valley was Patrice Maynard, who offered the public this by way of an explanation. “She’s a young teacher, a learning teacher,” Maynard said.

The teacher was learning. The lesson, apparently, was that you cannot belt a seven-year-old to furniture in the state of New York without a dozen families noticing. Tuition well spent.

There was, it turned out, no legal reckoning available. A spokesman for the state Education Department explained it. Corporal punishment is forbidden in New York’s public schools. On private schools, he said, the law is silent. It was the policy that governed Hawthorne Valley that year, and it held.

McConnell and her husband Richard Jerram

And what happened to Claire? Nothing. The Times Union ran the story and it was picked up for a minute on the AP wire. Parents found other schools. Claire was neither charged nor named in any complaint that reached a courthouse. You’d think this would be the end of the road for Claire’s teaching career, but it wasn’t. She moved to England for a while and taught drama. She came back to the states and started teaching nursery school in Philadelphia working with younger, more vulnerable children.

Many have said that this is not Mitch’s sin. But it begs the question where did Claire learn such brutality? It’s not as if it was taught in college. What we do know is that abusers are often the product of abuse. What we also know is that Mitch is more than willing to “restrain” people and institutions in efforts to control the room. We’ve seen it for years. Does anyone believe that Mitch was a loving, nurturing parent?

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a strangeness in Mitch’s personal life. His wife flying off to China the day after he is rushed to the hospital. Nothing from his three daughters. Just the barren news day with a few promises of McConnell’s return. The Senate’s own Lazarus.

The reason the story is worth exhuming is not the tape and the belt. It is the silence and lack of accountability. The daughter got the benefit of a system built to ask no questions of the private and the well-connected. It is about accountability and how in this country it once had been a public utility. But not for the McConnells. They’re special. Indeed.

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