LYNNFIELD — No more business as usual. Time for accountability. More questions, more answers.
That’s what Lynnfield Planning Board Chair Brian Charville had to say in a Facebook post announcing he is running for a seat on the town’s School Committee.
“I do not believe that the School Committee is asking the right questions of the administration,” Charville said. “Nobody has been able to explain the true situation of space or determine with accuracy the true capacity of every inch of space. That is a process that needs input from public health, from design specialists such as an architect, from educators. I saw that at the last meeting (on Feb. 2) and got up the next day and realized that this committee was giving unsatisfactory answers. That’s when I decided to run. I’ve talked to many parents who feel the same way.”
The town election is set for April 13. Charville will be challenging incumbents Tim Doyle and Phil McQueen, who Town Clerk Linda Emerson said have also pulled papers.
The father of three children — two in first and second grade and another who will be a kindergartner next fall — Charville said he has 34 more years in the Lynnfield Public Schools system and he is “not satisfied with the status quo.”
“I look at it as being…five years down and 34 to go,” Charville said. “More can and must be done for our students and teachers. Accepting business as usual means lost opportunities. I believe in cooperation, science, public health and the power of common sense.”
Charville dismisses claims that because he has young children, his main area of interest will focus on Lynnfield’s two elementary schools.
“People assume that because Katie (DePrizio, who is also running for a seat on the committee) and I have young kids, we are only going to (talk) about the elementary schools, but the truth is our kids will be in every level from elementary through high school, so my concern extends to all of our schools.”
Charville said he believes teachers are essential workers and “should be treated as such,” and that “kids learn best through in-person instruction.” He said he has teachers and school administrators in his family and is in favor of teachers unions.
While he said Lynnfield schools should have in-person learning — “to the greatest extent allowed by public-health standards, parent choice and the capacity of our facilities” — he is not in favor of the immediate resumption of “full-blown in-person learning … in disregard of reality or professional opinions.”
Charville, a 2001 graduate of Duke University, where he majored in political science and government, also graduated from Wake University Law School in 2005. He has served as chief operating officer for Ferris Development Group and Ferris Construction, LLC since March 2018. He has been general counsel of Ferris Development and Ferris Capital, LLC since May 2015 and general counsel of Ferris Construction LLC since March 2016.
Before that, Charville was a senior associate at the Boston-based law firm of Murphy and Riley, P.C. He was previously an assistant Arlington County attorney, working as an in-house city attorney in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Charville noted that his first experience working in government made a significant impact in his life, which led to meeting his wife, Bridget, and eventually settling with his family in Lynnfield.
“That’s when I met my wife, who was working in the D.C. area at the time,” Charville said. “Within a matter of months after our first child was born we decided to come here, as she is from Andover and we wanted to be near my in-laws. We were in Charlestown for a couple of years, and then came here and the rest is history.
“I have a mentality that the government has a role to play in society and life, and I think President Kennedy said, ‘We choose certain things not because they are easy, but because they’re hard.’ I have the kind of personality that if I hear of a need or I think there are challenges on the horizon, I want to run toward it rather than away from it,” he added.
“I think this is a time with our schools where it’s not just the challenges of COVID, but also the challenges of space generally, expansion, and the budget and the competitiveness of college admissions and the 21st century economy where we have to be able to compete across international borders, that what we are doing in our four schools in Lynnfield is so important.”
