Making a Difference

Making a Difference Brendan Salisbury earns Eagle Scout ranking as a 14 year old By Christina Fuoco-Karasinski

To say Brendan Salisbury is motivated would be an understatement.

The 14-year-old eighth grader at Sunset Ridge School has already earned his Eagle Scout rank, something only 4% of scouts obtain after a lengthy review process in their late teens.

“I worked very hard to get it this quickly,” Salisbury says.

For his project, he built an obstacle course for endangered horses off Circle Mountain Road.

“We cleaned the land and the trails with an ATV and built obstacles such as a bridge and teeter totter for the horses,” he shares. “I built all these wooden obstacles by hand. My beneficiary rep for the project used to be a wood shop instructor. He taught me how to build all the obstacles for it.”

The idea came organically for Salisbury, who thought of it as a Star Scout. He had an epiphany while speaking to a neighbor.

“I had been bouncing around the idea for a little while,” he says. “I was getting ready to start thinking about my Eagle Scout project and I wanted to focus on SBE (Straight Babson Egyptian). My neighbor was telling me it’s hard to sell his breed right now because of a lack of training. I thought, ‘Why not build an obstacle course to make them more profitable?’”

Salisbury sees many benefits to being an Eagle Scout, namely the leadership and networking skills he gained.

“I had 35 people at my project,” he recalls. “I had to lead all of them in a common goal for about four and a half hours. Delegating was quite difficult. In the end it taught me to let go a little bit. It was a very long and extensive project, but it was definitely worth it.”

Moving past the Eagle Scouts, Salisbury is aiming for a Flinn Scholarship so he can study neurology at Stanford, which has an Eagle Scout Society. He wants to become a neurosurgeon.

“I’ve always loved neurology,” says Salisbury, who’s in the National Junior Honor Society. “My mother and my father encouraged me to pursue whatever I want. They allow me the freedom to find out who I am and what I desire to become.”

His favorite subject is math, thanks to his seventh-grade math teacher, Briana Ciolino. “I hated math until about the sixth grade, when I was taking seventh-grade math,” he says. “My teacher taught me my love of math. Everything was incredibly easy and sparked that fire in me that I didn’t know I had for math.”

H is mot her, Courtenay Douglas-Salisbury, and his father, Matthew Salisbury, a financial manager at Charles Schwab, are proud of Salisbury and his sister, Madelene.

“Brendan is one of the most compassionate young men I’ve ever known,” DouglasSalisbury says. “I’m the school counselor at Anthem School and Sunset Ridge School. I’m in contact with a lot of children and teens. He’s someone who strives to make a difference in our community.

“I’m very civic minded. My husband is, too. We volunteer and give back to our church and local community. We participate with St. Vincent de Paul food drives and toy drives. That’s one of the things we find really important in our family. We are grateful for what we have. We’re so blessed, and we want to help others be blessed.”

Salisbury just wants to help others. “My ultimate goal with life is to inspire other people to be what they want to be and be the best person they can be,” he says. “I feel if everyone in the world reached their full potential, we’ll get as close to perfection as possible.”