Applicants

Johns Hopkins Hospital neuro-surgeon Ben Carson says good grades ought to rate as many accolades as a strong jump shot -- and he's putting his money where his mouth is.With the help of a $200,000 yearly contribution from the Abell Foundation, Carson's scholarship fund will provide an annual $1,000 award for a child in every Baltimore public school. The fund has provided 70 scholarships since 1995 to students in Maryland, Delaware and Washington, and Carson hopes the new money will lay the foundation to expand the program even further.

When is biology not considered a science? When you're looking for $3,000 from the state of Maryland to help out with college tuition.That's what William F. Clark found out when his daughter Anne applied for help under the Maryland Science and Technology Scholarship Program, which began awarding money this year to state students majoring in those fields at schools in the state.Education officials budgeted for 2,000 scholarships, and 700 applicants were approved for the program, which, despite its name, does not cover most traditional science majors.

When Global Security Inc. advertises for new employees, the pitch is enticing: Come join a growing company and become an office manager for $15 an hour. No experience necessary.Applicants arrive to find a U.S. map studded with push pins from New York to California next to a message board saying, "You pick a city!" By selling fire extinguishers and other safety equipment, a company manual exhorts, you can "Walk The Road To Riches."The road instead almost always leads to a dead end of disappointment and debt, according to investigators and dozens of angry job applicants in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Baltimore County's generous contract offer to its police union has nearly doubled applications for employment by officers working elsewhere, police said yesterday -- and the overwhelming majority of applicants came from the city of Baltimore.The final tally for this year's training class of officers from other agencies: 151 applications from around the country, with 121 of those from the city. This year also brought two firsts, county police spokesman Bill Toohey said: one uniformed Secret Service officer applied, and one FBI agent.

If you are a student/athlete who resides in Anne Arundel County, plays at least one varsity sport and also does the job in the classroom, you are eligible to apply for the 17th All-Anne Arundel County Academic-Athletic Team.Again The Sun is looking for the county's top 20 student-athletes. Ten male and 10 female students will be selected and receive plaques at a banquet at Michaels Eighth Avenue in Glen Burnie.Two overall winners -- one boy and one girl -- will receive $5,000 scholarships for the college of their choice.

Baltimore's public schools have done a poor job of attracting the best college graduates to teach in the school system and often have left them to flounder without the guidance of experienced teachers, according to an Abell Foundation report.While suburban school systems offer teaching contracts to the best prospects among graduating college seniors as early as February, city schools typically hire in late May or June.The study found that the city schools' personnel office appears overwhelmed and disorganized.

WASHINGTON -- In a ballroom in the basement of a hotel here, some of the most educated people in America stand -- resumes in hand, nerves in check -- hoping that somewhere in the sea of tables in front of them is the chance to pursue their chosen profession.The problem is that the booming American economy is not crying out for philosophers.``I feel so sorry for the applicants,'' says the Rev. Joseph Conley of Fordham University in New York, one of the 150 or so colleges interviewing last week at the annual Eastern division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.

CERTAIN flash points in America's civil rights struggle represent moments of moral awakening: Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat; John Lewis' beating at the Edmund Pettus Bridge; Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from a Birmingham jail. By raising long submerged issues into stark and vivid relief, these events forced a reckoning -- and reckoned a change. They forced us to re-evaluate our beliefs, and, finally, take action.Recently, we witnessed another such moment: 1.25 million cries for help voiced by poor, largely minority families, seeking something most Americans take for granted -- a decent education for their children.

The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Franklin Square Hospital announced an agreement yesterday under which the hospital will pay $325,000 to African-Americans who were denied nursing and file clerk jobs from 1993 to 1997.Judy Navarro, an investigator in the Baltimore office of the EEOC, said this was the largest such agreement reached by the office in several years. As part of the agreement, she said, Franklin Square will not only compensate people denied jobs but will be "monitoring its applicant flow with the goal of expanding on diversity."

WASHINGTON -- In a ballroom in the basement of a hotel here, some of the most educated people in America stand -- resumes in hand, nerves in check -- hoping that somewhere in the sea of tables in front of them is the chance to pursue their chosen profession.The problem is that the booming American economy is not crying out for philosophers."I feel so sorry for the applicants," says the Rev. Joseph Conley of Fordham University in New York, one of the 150 or so colleges interviewing last week at the annual Eastern division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.

RALEIGH, N.C. - The sweaty-palmed college interview just got a little more comfortable at Wake Forest University. Starting this month, any applicant can request a virtual interview with an admissions officer via Webcam and the Internet. It's part of the university's new admissions process that emphasizes personal interaction and no longer requires applicants to submit SAT or ACT test scores. Peter Chawaga, 17, was interviewed from the warmth of the family room in his home in Haverford, Pa. He applied to Wake Forest this fall and was among the first 30 prospective students to take part in the long-distance experiment.

Kristin Covaleskie hid her face behind her long, brown hair as her principal, the Baltimore schools CEO and an entourage of administrators, fellow teachers and media streamed into her classroom yesterday and interrupted her lesson. The principal, Edward English, came bearing a bouquet of lilies, roses and daisies. The schools chief, Andres Alonso, had his hands full with a basket containing - among other goodies - a new laptop computer and a digital camera. He kissed Covaleskie on the cheek.

Shibu Jose has placed ad after ad in area newspapers and on Web sites seeking tech-savvy workers for his Ellicott City software consulting company. But the resumes he receives are thin. Too often, applicants lack fluency in the complex software-speak he needs to keep his business competitive. So, like tens of thousands of employers nationwide, he seeks foreign talent through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' visa program for highly skilled professionals. And like his fellow employers, he waits.

Victor Breehne thought he had a job with Black & Decker Corp. all sewn up. He said the Towson-based power tools manufacturer made him an offer. All he had to do was pass a medical exam. But Breehne alleges the offer was rescinded because he flunked a "nerve conduction study" the company uses to predict if a person is likely to develop carpal tunnel syndrome, an often-disabling wrist and hand injury caused by repetitive motion. He has filed a class action suit in federal court in Tennessee, claiming the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has challenged the use of such tests, which aren't uncommon in manufacturing settings, on ADA grounds.

The rankings that pit American colleges and universities against each other tend to let in a little bit of light and a whole lot of noise. They drive colleges to acts of bad faith - such as encouraging applicants who don't have a chance of getting in, so as to appear more selective. And they drive applicants (and parents) to do stupid things - such as believing that there are only four or five colleges in the whole country that really matter. Last month, the Annapolis Group of liberal arts colleges agreed not to play along anymore with U.S. News and World Report, which puts together annual rankings in a best-selling issue.

Baltimore schools interim Chief Executive Officer Charlene Cooper Boston is among about a dozen candidates that the school board is considering for the permanent CEO's job, officials said yesterday. The board will interview the candidates over the next month, Chairman Brian D. Morris said at a briefing for reporters. It has received more than two dozen applications, around half of them viable ones, from people interested in leading the 83,000-student system. Morris said he hopes to name a permanent CEO before the school year ends in June.

Grand Canyon National Park will start taking applications today for self-guided rafting permits on the Colorado River, using a new lottery that replaces a 26-year-old wait-list system. The lottery will allocate permits for private trips as opposed to those run by commercial outfitters. Private, or noncommercial, trip permits, which have attracted more than 1,000 applicants a year, are among the most coveted and hardest to obtain in the national parks. Whether the lottery will make the permits easier to get is debatable.

A congressionally mandated consumer protection of huge potential value to home mortgage applicants has been stalled indefinitely because two federal agencies have not published required regulations, 33 months after the legislation was signed into law. The new consumer protection, created by the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, covers all loan applications in which a lender employs a "risk-based pricing" system that taps into an applicant's...

In Baltimore for barely two days, Felipe Carrasquillo was once-and-for-all convinced yesterday that he's ready to leave Puerto Rico to work as a police officer on the city's toughest streets. In his eyes, the city is clean, the Police Department is well-organized and the people - at least the few he has met - are nice. And then there's the chance to earn more money and better benefits, compared to what he has been earning in law enforcement on the Caribbean island. "It's the true American dream," Carrasquillo said.

A chronic shortage of school bus drivers - fueled by a shrinking applicant pool and limited work schedules - has Carroll County school officials pondering ways to make the job more appealing. "It's an ongoing problem," Jim Doolan, the school system's director of transportation services, said during an interview last week. "Eighteen years ago when I took this job, we were talking about a driver shortage. But it wasn't as severe then as it is now." He said the most significant contributor to the shortage is a dwindling supply of applicants.