Annapolis Middle

At Annapolis Middle, Dennehy said three weapons were confiscated this year -- a BB gun, a knife and a "look-alike" fake gun. The three students involved were expelled, and two appealed, asking to be readmitted.One is now at a county school for students with behavior problems, but the other -- the student who brought the BB gun -- is back at Annapolis Middle, only 2 1/2 months after his expulsion.County policy on school discipline doesn't explicitly deal with weapons or fighting, but lists six types of behavior that could resultin suspension or expulsion, including behavior that "disrupts the program of instruction" or "threatens the health, safety or welfare of others."

MAYO has a problem. Some community residents have sewn race into a discussion where it doesn't belong. The fruits of their labor came last week in a racially tinged death threat sent to Anne Arundel Schools Superintendent Carol S. Parham. The threatening letter objected to Dr. Parham's plan to temporarily transfer white children from Mayo Elementary School to an empty wing of majority-black Annapolis Middle while a new building is built for Mayo. The letter to Dr. Parham, who is African-American, was laced with profanity and racial epithets.

Southern Anne Arundel County civic groups opposed to busing children to school in Annapolis posted a $1,000 reward yesterday for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the author of a racially tinged death threat against county school Superintendent Carol S. Parham. The threat was in response to Parham's decision last month to bus 340 pupils from Mayo Elementary School to an unoccupied wing of Annapolis Middle School for two years while a new Mayo Elementary is being built.

After being rebuffed by the Anne Arundel County Board of Education, the principal of an Edgewater charter school is planning to appeal to local lawmakers to help the school find room to expand. The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) Harbor Academy, which now has 120 fifth- and sixth-graders inside Sojourner-Douglass College on Old Solomons Island Road is negotiating with Mount Moriah AME Church in Annapolis to build on the church's grounds, Principal Jallon Brown said. In the meantime, the school had hoped to move into Annapolis Middle School, which is two-thirds vacant, to keep to its plan to add a seventh grade in the fall and an eighth grade in 2008.

Screaming hordes of teen-agers generally reserve their yells for rap artists and television teen idols.But yesterday, students at Annapolis High and Annapolis Middle schools gave their vocal chords a workout for a football coach.Bill Belichick, head coach of the Cleveland Browns and a graduate of Annapolis High School, visited to encourage students to stay in school and stay away from drugs.Shaking hands and signing at least 100 autographs, Mr. Belichick made his first stop yesterday at his alma mater.

Saying it is unwilling to disrupt school schedules, the Anne Arundel County school board denied a request yesterday by the city of Annapolis to close schools on days when city elections are held. City officials had hoped to prevent interaction between voters and pupils, noting an incident in which a drunken adult walked through a middle school on a past election day. The city uses nine Annapolis elementary and middle schools as polling places during its elections, which are held on different years than state and general elections.

A DARK CLOUD hovers over the southern Anne Arundel communitv of Mayo. The haze came weeks before some dangerous lunatic sent a racially charged death threat to school Superintendent Carol S. Parham on March 21. Things got ominous when racism surfaced in discussions over Ms. Parham's plan to transfer the mostly white Mayo Elementary School population, temporarily, to an empty wing of majority black Annapolis Middle School. Never mind that the elementary school students would never come into contact with the middle school students.

Bates and Annapolis middle schools won't be merged to save money, as two Anne Arundel County school board members had suggested, but teachers and students will have to do with fewer supplies and school buses and pay more fees for athletics and other programs in the fall.During a daylong meeting yesterday, the board finished cutting $9 million from its budget for the fiscal year that begins tomorrow. Board members said they needed to make the cuts because the $454 million education budget approved in May by the County Council does not meet basic operating expenses.

Meeting today to offer information on storm recovery Annapolis-area residents recovering from Tropical Storm Isabel are invited to a Disaster Recovery Community information meeting from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. today at Annapolis Middle School. Representatives from government and relief agencies will be available to talk with residents and provide information. Agencies scheduled to participate include the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Maryland Insurance Commissioner's Office and the Anne Arundel County Crisis Response System.

There seems to be a sneaky move afoot on the part of direct mail marketers and purveyors of things by catalog.It is no longer enough to tease us with nearly irresistible temptation for months before Christmas; now they've put it all on sale and are running it up the flagpole again -- and like Pavlov's dog, we salute, or at least start to.A quick scan of the turned down pages in the 13 catalogs that have come since Jan. 1 reveals $989.95 in things that caught my eye, either for myself, my home, or for presents -- and that doesn't count instances where there were six or seven things on a page (Metropolitan Museum)