Original Research by School Decision on Brentwood Academy
Brentwood Academy sits on Franklin Street in Nashua, New Hampshire's second-largest city, serving grades nine through twelve as part of the Nashua School District. It is classified as a regular public school, but its enrollment is strikingly small for a high school, with only a couple dozen students spread across four grade levels. That size points to a specialized setting rather than a comprehensive high school, though the data does not describe a specific alternative mission. A parent considering Brentwood Academy should ask the school directly what its program is designed to do and who it is built to serve, because the available records do not spell that out.
The student body is predominantly white, with a smaller Hispanic presence and a few students identifying as Black or multiracial. A substantial share of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, which situates Brentwood Academy among schools serving lower-income families in the Nashua area. The data does not include counts or rates for students with individualized education programs or English learners, so those slices of the population are invisible here. A family whose child receives special education or language support services would want to confirm with the school what is available and how it is delivered in such a small setting.
State assessment results were not available for Brentwood Academy, and no graduation rate was reported. For a school this small, those gaps often reflect the nature of the program rather than a weakness to read into. When only a handful of students sit in each grade, the state may suppress test results to protect student privacy, and a graduation rate may not be calculated or published in the standard way. The absence of multi-year trend data, course access information, staffing figures, discipline data, and attendance data means the academic picture is almost entirely blank from what we have. We looked for the school's program offerings and found nothing, so we left that out rather than guess. A parent would need to go to the school or the district for anything beyond enrollment and demographics.
Nashua itself gives context for the housing market a family would enter. The city has three commercial districts: a historic downtown along Main Street, the Amherst Street and Route 101A corridor to the northwest, and South Nashua along Daniel Webster Highway near the Massachusetts border, anchored by Pheasant Lane Mall. The economy has moved away from its textile-mill past toward financial services, high technology, and defense, with BAE Systems, Dell, Oracle, and Teradyne among the major employers. Two regional medical centers and the Boston Air Route Traffic Control Center also anchor employment. The Nashua Millyard, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is being redeveloped with loft apartments, artist studios, and startup workspaces, and a pedestrian Riverwalk is being built along the Nashua River through public and private investment funded by tax increment financing. The Broad Street Parkway, described publicly as the largest municipally managed public works project in New Hampshire, connects downtown to the Everett Turnpike and improves access to the Millyard district.
Housing in the zip code around the school is costly relative to national norms, with typical home values well above the national benchmark and somewhat below the state benchmark. Rents are moderate relative to local incomes. The market shows strong demand and ample supply by county measures, and homes move quickly, with a median time on market of only a few weeks. Listing prices in the county have eased slightly year over year, but the overall cost picture means a family relocating to Nashua for this school should expect a competitive housing environment.
At the district level, Nashua School District has brought back a Title I preschool program, expanding early childhood access, and has centralized all student registrations through a Welcome Center at Birch Hill Elementary. Those changes do not directly affect a high school student at Brentwood Academy, but they signal a district investing in enrollment infrastructure and early intervention. Beyond that, the district brief offered little on high school programming or strategic priorities, so there is nothing further to report.
What a parent has to work with here is thin. Brentwood Academy is a very small high school serving a lower-income student population in a city with a diversifying economy and an active downtown. The academic and programmatic data that would let a family judge fit is not in the record. The most useful next step is a direct conversation with the school about what it offers, how it supports its students, and what outcomes its graduates see.
See more original research from School Decision →