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Future Leades: Brentsville
There is a unifying theme that link five future leaders from Brentsville District High School: They give back to their communities by teaching.
Carolyn Browder
An only child who attended the private Linton Hall School in Bristow from kindergarten through eighth grade, Carolyn Browder knew just a handful of students when she switched to a public high school.
Yet she is now the senior class president.
Her ability to relate to classmates well enough to earn their votes can be traced to her time working with the Center for the Arts in Manassas.
As an assistant teacher for theater productions, Browder has learned that there is “never really one way to relate to kids.”
That goes for her, too. She stood out in geography class as one of the few students fascinated by the subject.
“No one seemed to really share my interest, which was weird,” she said.
Instead of singling her out, students would come to her for help with work. She has even made geography her own niche and was a state finalist in the annual Geography Bee.
As editor-in-chief of the school’s newspaper, she taught another lesson by creating a fake identity on the popular social networking site Facebook.
“So we found out that with one person accepting one random stranger into our network, that random stranger can get everybody’s phone numbers, addresses; all kinds of personal information,” she said, adding, “and even some incriminating information that could get you in trouble with the school.”
If she gets into The College of William and Mary, her first-choice school, Browder plans on a double major in history and education.
“I feel like I’ve learned how to convey what I want to teach people really well, and I’m just so into history and just so many kids miss out with basic textbook answers,” she said. “I want to give them that extra information that makes history exciting because I’m excited about it.”
Ali Liggett
Combine the worlds of running, fashion, business, teaching and nutrition and somehow Ali Liggett fits right in.
Being a social butterfly has gotten Liggett involved in an eclectic mix of activities, from track and cross country in her freshman year of high school, to the Future Career and Community Leaders of America.
While tutoring children at Transitional Housing BARN in Bristow, she has worked down to the fundamentals of child development, teaching kids what to do and not to do.
“I feel like I can impact them by showing them how they should act,” said Liggett.
In return, some of the children have developed a special bond with her.
When she walks into the building, “[They] scream my name and they’re like Ali! Ali! Ali! Ali!” she said.
Her involvement with kids has technically spanned the globe. As a member of the FC&CLA, she helped set up a fundraising drive at Brentsville so her group could buy soccer balls and send them to Africa.
Liggett is planning on attending James Madison University, where she is set to major in nutrition.
She acknowledged that it is an odd choice for her because she knows less about nutrition than about some of her other interests, like business, teaching and fashion.
It’s the ability to affect the lifestyle choices of people so they live longer and healthier that she sees as the biggest perk of her potential career. In a country where people tend to gravitate toward the junk food aisles in the middle of grocery stores, she thinks she can find a way to direct people instead to the outside aisles, where the healthy food is kept.
“And, I would much rather have people shop on the outside than the inside,” she said.
Katelin Towsend
Cheerleaders do not always have a reputation for being among the most business-savvy folks at a high school.
Katelin Towsend defies that stereotype.
In her freshman year, she found that the Cambridge Program classes at Brentsville were harder than she expected.
Once she got the hang of how things worked, however, Towsend began working with word processing and became interested in graphic design.
Now she is planning to take her skills to the University of Louisville, where she will be working in fashion while doing something completely businesslike: marketing.
“I want to be able to take images and make them into something really cool to look at,” she said.
For Towsend, cheerleading has not only been a fun after-school activity. She became the “mommy” of the team, as she put it, in her senior year and taught some of her teammates everything from tumbling and pyramid-building to simply controlling their enthusiasm.
This past year, Brentsville’s cheer team captured the Virginia state title while Towsend served as one of the team leaders.
“States this year was the best part of my life,” she said, as her face radiated an ever-present smile.
As a member of the Future Business Leaders of America, she helped organize Make a Difference Week on campus, where each day of the week featured a new theme designed to enlighten students about various causes.
Some days were marked for breast cancer awareness. On other days, students pitched in to raise money for the March of Dimes.
Signs were placed all of the school, she said, and announcements were made over the loudspeakers.
In a creative twist, Towsend even organized arm-wrestling events for charity that became popular with lunchtime crowds.
“I’m going to try to keep community service in my life,” said Towsend.
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson is the perennial athlete.
Since his freshman year, the Brentsville District cross country team has won the state title four consecutive times. He has been a part of the team every year, and this past fall season was no exception.
As the No. 2 runner on the team, Johnson helped lead the dramatically underestimated 2007 Tiger team back on top of their throne as the supreme Group AA school in the commonwealth after starting the year ranked by Milestat.com as only No.7 in the state.
For Johnson, it is not that difficult to convey the importance of winning to underclassmen.
“We are big on tradition,” Johnson said. “So we just tell them, tradition is ‘We go to states, and we win.’ And every year, that bar gets higher, so you've got to keep raising it and keep working harder.”
It’s the mindset that has made Brentsville the dominant force in Group A and AA high school cross country during the last two decades.
He has challenged himself since middle school as he opted to attend Brentsville District over Stonewall Jackson because of the former’s lauded Cambridge Program.
“I was looking for something along the same curriculum, only stronger,” he said, referring to the level of education he received at All Saints Catholic School.
“The workload that’s involved and the time-management skills that I learned; I think it will help me in college, like, when you have all that free time and you have to manage your time wisely,” he said.
Now that the spring sports season has arrived, Johnson is continuing to keep his status on the school’s honor roll, taking demanding classes like calculus, while playing second base on the school’s baseball team.
“When I get home from practice, I know I don’t have that much free time. It’s straight to the books,” he said.
Scott Betterly
Three consecutive generations of the Betterly family have entered and exited the halls of Brentsville District High School.
So to say Scott Betterly has expectations to meet would be an understatement.
Without a doubt, though, the younger Betterly has forged his own identity.
For the Tiger baseball team, Betterly’s regularly hits above .300 for a season as the team’s No. 1 pitcher, ended his sophomore year with a 2.85 ERA.
Inside the halls of Brentsville, the senior is as serious as they come, keeping a near-perfect GPA of 3.955 while tutoring freshmen in algebra and geometry.
His time with the Future Business Leaders of America also keeps him active. Betterly has run the gamut in community service, pitching in to assist the likes of Toys for Tots, SERVE’s Operation Turkey and Project ASK, which lends support to children with cancer.
“I think both work with each other because you’re always competing against somebody else,” Betterly said of sports and business. “And you always need to be organized and always need to know what you need to do to accomplish whatever your vision is or your goal.”
He plans on majoring in business information technology at Virginia Tech and thinks he can help Virginia farmers run their operations more efficiently.
Keeping Nokesville as the rural enclave of Prince William County also means a lot to him as someone whose family is in agriculture.
“I want to make sure this is an area that stays away from all the buildings, because this is a great place with open fields and this is what it's known for,” he said. “And I just want to make sure that we can keep it that way.”
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