Press Kit

David L. Brennan
Chairman, White Hat

Education first became a passion for David Leo Brennan in the 1980s when, as a manufacturing company CEO, he found many of his employees to be functionally illiterate even though they had attended public schools. Rather than accept the status quo, he opened his own schools in his plants, made education mandatory, and paid his employees to attend. Soon, spouses and children were asking for courses in these “Learning Centers,” and they were welcomed and taught.

What was unprecedented then about the Learning Centers was the 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.”

In his recent book, Victory for Kids: The Cleveland School Voucher Case, Brennan recounted his 10-year fight up 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 his most enduring contribution to education and 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.

Today, Brennan is developing a second book, tentatively titled Society's Second Chance. This effort explores the potential that programs such as Life Skills would have on a national scale to remedy a national disgrace: the fact that a million young Americans quit high school every year and never return. Even more disturbing, half have no earned income in any given year.

David Brennan has served public, private, sectarian, non-sectarian schools, voucher, and charter schools. He has helped develop private and public scholarship funds, plus programs and schools for needy children in urban school districts throughout Ohio. In 1998, he founded White Hat Management 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.

David and Ann Brennan are both attorneys and life-long residents of Akron, Ohio. They are the parents of four children and share the joys of 10 grandchildren.