In a busy campaign season leading up to the April 7 municipal elections, the three Brentwood mayoral candidates are meeting regularly with residents.
Mark Wilson spoke Saturday at a supporter’s home, Chris Thornton will hold his first of eight meetings on Friday, and Patrick Toohey hosted 30-40 supporters at OB Clark’s Monday evening.
Toohey said he sees Brentwood Boulevard dividing Brentwood in two, and said the funds and technology are there for a tunnel under the street to connect the community to parks to the east, including miles of trails. He also spoke about revitalizing residential areas.
“The last couple of years have been contentious in the city,” he said. “I want to take us forward, end the conflict, and make things like this occur.
Toohey said the Brentwood School District is an underutilized resource.
“People who live here now want to stay permanently; get more residents, more children. It’s a wonderful school district, people don’t seem to realize,” he said. “It only has 800 students; there no reason we can’t get that up to a thousand.
“When I look around me I see a great community, and I think we could be a better one, and it’s my passion to make it that better community,” Toohey said.
Are you worried about football when the reason for going to school is to learn? Remove all the
students who do not play football, then what would be the size average of the classes? Then also, what would be the new scholastic average?
Apparently my message did not come through as intended. Totally agree job #1 for the school is education, no doubt. I thought long about class size vs the football team as I composed my comment.
As long as the citizens of Brentwood are willing to pay for it the class size can shrink to literally any level but at some point the question needs to be asked when does a merger make more sense than staying independent. What is that class size. How far will taxpayers go? Perennially Brentwood is in the top five districts is expenditures per student. While a great attribute if the class size shrinks to 50 does that justify staying independent. What about 35. Where is that point? And I believe there is a point!
I do not know you as you do not reveal yourself as so many on this forum. Therefore I do not know your affiliation with the district. I brought up the football team for a reason. It is ingrained in Brentwood tradition. People talk about wanting a Town Center and as a 20 year chairman of Planning & Zoning I agree it would be wonderful to have in the community. At this time the closest thing the community has to “town center” is Friday nights in the fall on the south end zone of the football field for a game. Neighbor talking to neighbor, the best sense of community available in Brentwood. Loose that and there is more than a football team lost.
The original message stated that the schools are “nice.” As I stated I went through the district as did my my kids. At 100-125 kids per class in my time it was “NICE.” In fact my kids never called the district nearly as nice as I did when I was a kid. Could be different generations or something else. I am aware of people who leave Brentwood due to lack of population at the schools and their perception of the impact on their children’s experience.
In my opinion it is time for the citizens to address the school district with some form of strategic planning. In my opinion they seem to be immune to citizen review.
Why would we want to get the school district up to 1000? It is the fact that it is small that makes it so nice
I think the issue is trend. I graduated Brentwood in 1969. In those years the District was graduating 100-125 students per year. My children graduated Brentwood early 2000s and class size generally was under 75. And that was over 10 years ago. If the trend continues it may be difficult to field a football team, a major tradition at the High School. Of the graduates now, how many come from the transfer program. If that ends, then what is the class size? At some point the taxpayers have to ask the question of how much tax money am I spending to support a large staff and real estate to educate a small number of children. The District is a great resource but at some point based on trend it could shrink to a point of not making sense.