Healing from Great River School's goat tragedy

My name is Lisa Holt, and I lead the goat and chicken program at Great River School.

On the night of Monday, June 26, 2023, our beloved school goat Hazelnut was stolen from her locked pen at Great River School in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. Two cars, one a dark-colored SUV and later a second car, pulled up next to the goat pen for 33 minutes with at least two people, and left with Hazelnut. The next day, we discovered she was gone when we went to feed the goats. While this seemed unbelievable, after exploring every logical possibility, we figured out where the fence had been broken through. Hazelnut, an approximately 120 lb goat, had been lifted out of a several-foot-high retaining wall and taken away, and the security footage from a neighboring business later confirmed this to be true.

Our community launched into a massive search effort, with support from not only the immediate school community, but neighbors for miles, businesses, extended family, the railroad, the St Paul police, Animal Control, and ultimately the greater Twin Cities public through social media and the support of our local news media.

TL/DR: Our school’s beloved goat was stolen and found dead this week, our hearts are broken, and at the behest of our larger community, we are opening this fundraiser to be able to safely continue the goat program that is core to our school. We continue to welcome any information that may help in the investigation or in understanding what happened to Hazelnut.

The fuller story:

Great River School is a public Montessori charter school with students from first through 12th grade. We were founded in 2004 with a vision of world peace through Montessori education. At Great River, we help connect students not only to academics, but to themselves, to one another, to the earth and to the wider community. We run a micro-farm onsite on our small urban campus, with goats, chickens, one duck, and a garden that our students help tend as part of their education.

Our animals are core to our sense of identity at our school, and they are absolutely beloved by our students and community. Hazelnut and our other two goats, Magnolia and Midnight, were visited and cared for by a stream of students, staff and community members each and every day. One could easily say they are the soul of our school.

Hazelnut in particular was an extremely special goat. She road-tripped home to Great River with us in our family’s minivan all the way from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She and her sister Magnolia were great travelers, and even made the cable news at a rest stop along the way. She was chosen for Great River specifically because of her level of socialization, extreme friendliness and trust of people, her Oberhasli milking lines, and her thorough training as a pack goat, which made her as friendly and as responsive as a well-trained off-leash dog.

This goat LOVED people. She would hike for miles alongside you, knew her name and would come when she was called (if she hadn't already come right up to you, which she had), and would even jump into a car on voice command. These are rare and precious things in a goat, and she was exactly what our school needed. We had plans to begin milking her and Magnolia next spring, and to engage in all of the learning around those processes with our students. We also planned to go on hikes with the goats and our students. Most of all, though, Hazelnut was a loving and reliable presence in her pen at school, there for any kid - or adult - that needed her company. I have known many goats in my life, and it always felt to me like this goat had an old soul.

Hazelnut was last seen alive on Wednesday afternoon at 3:45 pm, 6/28/2023, being carried across the shoulders of a man over a guardrail down to a nearby wooded train track, her head up and looking around. Tragically, this final sighting was by a distant neighbor who, at the time, had no idea that the goat was stolen or had any connection to our school, and the information came too late to stop what happened next.

Our search for our stolen goat ended when Hazelnut’s remains were found in a plastic tub in an alley in the 300 block of LaFond Avenue in St Paul on the morning of Friday, June 30th, thanks to a tip from a community member. The police and Animal Control investigation into this is ongoing. Any information is appreciated.

As a community, we are heartbroken, horrified, and grieving.

We had moved Magnolia and Midnight to emergency safety immediately when we found Hazelnut missing, first in community members’ backyards and then to the previous goat lead’s farm in northern Minnesota, for the time being.

Now, we have a lot of work to do as a community. Our students - and all of us - have to grieve within our families and learn how to make sense of this horrible event. We have to continue to work to find out and integrate what happened to Hazelnut. We have to figure out how to pursue healing within our community, and potentially restorative justice, in the face of either knowing, or not knowing, the full extent of what happened to her. We have to grieve together and memorialize Hazelnut. We have to bury our goat. With her, we have to bury all the years of life she had ahead of her with us. And, we have to figure out how to continue to have our goats in their place at the center of our school’s heart, with safer infrastructure against the largest predator in an urban area, which, we have sadly learned, is humans.

We need to rebuild the goats’ pen in a way that is much more secure against human predation, while maintaining accessibility and welcome to our students in the day to day. We need to further secure our chicken infrastructure. We need to cover the costs of setting up an emergency pen for them at their temporary farm. When our hearts and space are ready, we need to find another goat as much like Hazelnut as possible, and she was one in a million.

We need to do all of this as a low-funded public charter school that receives 87% of each dollar that traditional public school receives. The kids worked for weeks this spring on a fundraiser festival they organized themselves to help pay for the spring chick hatch and other program costs. As the animal program lead, I have regularly worked to pull in donations such as de-nailing old lumber from the burn pile at the summer camp I grew up attending, and surplus grain from their riding program, as part of contributing to our animal program. We have been planning to build a pair of milking stands, a goat shelter expansion, and a new climbing structure for the goats out of salvaged old bunk beds from the camp this summer and fall. As a teacher, I look through Goodwills in my spare time for collars, harnesses, leashes, feed bins, classroom and farm supplies, and more, so I can prioritize things like high-quality minerals and supplements for the animals and stay realistically within our budget.

I do all of this and manage the program as a teacher who also maintains a normal load of regular classes. A few of my fellow staff, a group of students called animal managers, and a small community of parents are also key supports in the day-to-day functioning of the program. It would not be possible to do what we do without their generosity and their showing up, in all the ways that they do. We operate on a thin shoestring and a lot of heart.

While we have always been able to take good care of our animals, we have done so all of these years with a physical setup that depends on being able to trust our wider community to protect and respect our animals, too. Now that this trust is shattered, it will take much more infrastructure than it did before to be able to bring our goats back home to continue their key presence with the students and community, and for all of us to still be able to rest at night.

We are receiving such an outpouring of grief, outrage, and “what can I do to help?!” from our community at this time, from people connected to the school to perfect strangers. Having a community, wider than I ever imagined, truly pull together to help each other through something awful, leaves me at a loss for words. The sense of not being alone in this suffering is something I’m so humbled to experience. That support has its own massive value in keeping us wholehearted, and has nothing to do with money itself. We are so, so grateful for all of the kindness, help, flyering, posting, reposting, commenting, texts, phone calls, information sharing, searching, interviewing, news coverage, patience, emotional and logistical support, shared shock and grieving, and simply for the bearing of witness for Hazelnut and for us. Thank you for honoring just how much her life matters.

We are making this fundraiser at the encouragement of many people as a space to more fully share this story on our own terms, and for those people who truly do *want* to help, in the cases where money is a form of help that they can feel good about giving. It is so uncomfortable to set a fundraising goal, when the needs are really about levels of triage and of cost; when it's not possible to accurately calculate or communicate those specific financial costs at this time; when there's nothing we want more than for this to have never happened; and when the reality is that we can always better honor our animals and students with more to work with.

I do want to speak to what happens if there is money left after meeting the immediate costs that have been listed above, for transparency and to help in decision-making. The outpouring of support has been amazing. If it turns out that this is a situation where donations exceed the immediate costs for security and getting our goats home, we would first work to simply to be better set up and resourced in all sorts of smaller ways within our animal program, so it could more fully thrive. One upcoming project we hadn't figured out funding for yet is, for example, a "mineral buffet" for the goats, and another is setting up a fodder growing system where we could feed all of the animals freshly sprouted grains every day. Beyond things like that, the goat program would greatly benefit from acquiring a small trailer and/or fixing up a donated old pickup truck to have a school-based form of transportation for these goats. We could use it both to get to and from farms, the vet, goat events, and community members’ homes with the goats, as needed; and we could use it to get the goats out for goat hikes with students that can get us deeper into nature, which would give us even more ways for our students and animals to thrive together. Something like a used van or shortbus, for the animal program and beyond to use for the student side of transportation for these outings and other small-group field trips, like farm tours and connecting with local 4H resources, would also have an outsized impact on what we can do. I'm hesitant to name these last couple of things because they are longer-term dreams for the program, rather than immediately related to this tragedy, but I do want to be clear about what funds would be used for, and in what order, should it come to pass that there is an abundance.

The two most important things right now are to get our goats back home safely, and to figure out how to continue to heal as a school and as a community. I have faith that we can figure out how, even now when the path doesn’t seem so clear. What is clear is that we are doing this hard work together, and that's the biggest thing of all. Please know that every form of kindness and support that has been coming our way is valuable in this time of need. Thank you for whatever ways you show up. Even just by reading this, and in doing so, making us that much less alone in it all. I am grateful as we face the next steps of this big work.

Thank you all for listening, and for caring about Hazelnut, our students, and our community. It means the world. We will post updates as we have them.

Peace,

Lisa