By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Brandon Twp.-On Monday night the Brandon Board of Education voted 5-0 to approve their legislative priorities. Board members Kevin McClellan and Sarah Allen were absent with notice.
The four issues at the forefront of Brandon’s priorities are funding, reducing standardized testing, teacher evaluations and the supply of high quality teachers.

“This is us talking about some of the things that, legislatively, are important to the Brandon school district,” said superintendent Dr. Matt Outlaw. “We do need some legislative changes, there are some things that could really help Brandon and districts like ours.”
While many things that are a priority with Oakland Schools as a whole, there are some things that Outlaw feels apply to Brandon and districts like Brandon specifically.
“One of the things I’ve realized is that we are similar, we have a lot of priorities that are similar to Oakland Schools, but there are some that are unique to us,” said Outlaw. “For example, declining enrollment is a Brandon issue, it’s a Holly issue, but it’s not all of Oakland Schools because some of them are growing, so there’s examples of things that are Brandon issues and things that are county issues.”
Outlaw communicates with legislators for Brandon, and partakes in different legislative focus groups that work on policy and legislation for education.
“I think we’re at a spot as a board and as a state right now that I think there’s a lot of things that are going to change in education,” said Outlaw. “I just feel like it’s going to happen. And it’s not because of one individual or a governor or anything like that, it’s because of a variety of things that are happening. School funding is going to become a massive issue with the state.”
Some of the issues are state-wide problems, such as testing and common core expectations. Outlaw said they don’t want to burden students by over testing, but have meaningful testing still. He also said that the common core math expectation is a complaint in a lot of areas throughout the state.
“Those are the four areas that we’ve identified to start off for our board of education for conversation purposes,” said Outlaw.
He intends for the legislative priorities to change as time goes on and be a changing document, but to have it outlined for the district.
“I like having that direction,” said board president Diane Salter.