David Brennan

Bio

Mr. Brennan is currently the Chairman of Brennan Management Group, LLC, Akron, Ohio. Education, however, is his passion. It first became a focus for Mr. Brennan in the 1980s when, as a manufacturing CEO, he found many of his companies' employees to be functionally illiterate though they had gone to public schools. Rather than accept the status quo, he opened his own schools in his own plants, made education mandatory, and paid his employees to attend. Soon, spouses and children were asking for courses in these "Learning Centers," as well; and they were taught, too. What was unprecedented then about Learning Centers was computer-based instruction, which allowed students to work at their own pace and to succeed. The experience drove him, in the next decade, both to pioneer school vouchers and charter elementary schools and to open America's first diploma schools for high school dropouts. These he called "Life Skills Centers." Mr. Bennan fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, first to create and then maintain Ohio's voucher scholarship program. In June 2002, in a landmark decision, the Court supported the program and opened American education to parent choice. Life Skills Centers, though, may be an equally enduring contribution to education and to society. A unique blend of on-the-job experience and education techniques pioneered in the Learning Centers, Life Skills grants a high school diploma, not a GED. David Brennan has served public schools, private schools, sectarian, non-sectarian schools, voucher, and charter schools. He has helped develop private and public scholarship funds, and programs and schools for needy children in urban school districts throughout his state. In 1998, he founded and is Chairman of White Hat Management LLC a professional educational services firm that now helps institute and maintain charter elementary schools and Life Skills high schools. In 1997 Brennan received The (Ohio) Governor's Award for his unique contributions in the field of education. In 1999 he received The Peter Flanagan Children First Award, and in 2002 he and his wife, Ann, received the Malden Mills Corporate Kindness Award from Project Love. He has served as a trustee at both of his alma maters, The Ohio State University (1953) and Case Western Reserve School of Law (1957). He has also established law chairs at Case and the University of Akron.