Baltimore City Schools

Baltimore County got four new school board members yesterday, including a black woman who will be the first to help oversee the nation's 25th-largest school system.Named to the 12-member board by Gov. Parris N. Glendening were Carolyn Ross-Holmes, a direct-marketing specialist and Hernwood Elementary School volunteer; Jean Jung, a library media specialist from Dundalk; James Sasiadek, an educator who has worked in Baltimore City schools since 1969; and James Walker, a former teacher and principal.

When Maryland's private colleges went knocking on the door of St. Paul Cos. for a donation this year, the Minnesota-based company came up with an idea that would help not only college students but city schoolchildren as well.St. Paul and two other companies with offices in Baltimore, BT Alex. Brown Inc. and First Union, will announce today a commitment to underwrite at least nine scholarships and summer stipends for students who are interested in teaching in Baltimore's public schools.With city schools on a desperate search for teachers this year, the scholarship is one way for them to attract some of the state's top college students to teaching careers in a school system with the greatest need.

Celebrating continuing success on state tests, nearly 300 elementary and middle schools took home citations and cash yesterday, as the Maryland State Department of Education gave out its annual performance awards.Eighty-three of those schools shared $2.75 million, with Baltimore County garnering the most -- $736,000 for 21 of its schools that have shown significant progress for at least two years.Overall, 39 schools in the metropolitan area shared the wealth, with individual awards statewide ranging from $15,700 to $64,600.

Edward L. Goldsmith, an educator in Baltimore City schools for 40 years and the first principal at Northwestern High School, died Monday of a heart attack at his Mount Washington home, where he had lived since 1950.Dr. Goldsmith, 81, was known as a gentle but stern educator during a career in which he worked at four schools and in the school system's curriculum development office."He was a good teacher because of his interest in youths and the knowledge that their education was the stepping stones to the future," said his daughter, Anne Sterlock of Perry Hall.

Cutting shop classes a reason for shortage in skilled labor forceYour article "Workers opt for a trade" (June 29) comes about 30 years too late. I knew in the 1960s that we were heading for a shortage of skilled workers.I taught machine shop in the Baltimore City schools from the 1960s into the 1980s, eighth to 12th grades and some adult classes.In the 1960s, the administration decided that students should be prepared to enter college.First, it did away with most of the industrial arts classes in the junior high schools.

Baltimore City schools' top official called the findings of a Maryland children's advocacy group "hard-headed, wrong-minded and absolutely inaccurate" after the group asserted that the school system has spent millions of dollars on misguided and unsuccessful education reforms this year."

ANY SCHOOL reform effort worth its salt is bound to cause controversy. The remarkable thing about Maryland's effort to shore up its public schools is that the forces supporting reform have consistently been stronger than any dissatisfaction or outright opposition. Let's keep it that way.In the next two weeks, third- , fifth- and eighth-graders are embarking on the annual ritual of the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. Unlike traditional achievement tests, MSPAP does not measure individual performance.

THIS IS the first day of class for nearly half the public school children in Maryland, including those living in Anne Arundel, Carroll, Howard and Baltimore counties.Yet even for students who don't return until after Labor Day, including youngsters in Baltimore City and Harford County, the realization that summer is over and school is back hangs in the air like chalk dust.Every new school year summons a fresh excitement, like baseball season in spring (only a little more bittersweet and a lot more important)

Friday's editions reported incorrectly that Baltimore City schools would be open and that trash would be picked up President's Day, Feb. 17.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 2/19/97

'Ellen' will be breaking ground for TV familiesIn his April 27 column, "Ellen breaks with the past,'' TV critic David Zurawik writes that the character of Ellen Morgan coming out on television is important because, "It is the test case for moving gays and lesbians to full membership in our television families."

Six months after his inauguration, do you generally approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president? Yes 23% No 74% Not sure 3% (3,634 votes, results not scientific) Next poll: : Should charter schools such as Baltimore's successful KIPP Ujima Village Academy have to follow the same rules as other Baltimore City schools regarding teacher pay and work schedules? Vote at baltimoresun.com/vote

Some kids will do almost anything to get out of fourth period algebra class or a tough history exam. But planting a bomb in the building or setting the place on fire crosses a line separating stupid teenage pranks from serious criminal behavior that puts hundreds of lives at risk. There's no excuse for it, and it can't be tolerated. That's why Baltimore City Schools chief Andres Alonso is right to draw the line at students who commit arson or detonate explosives on school grounds, even if it has led to a spike in permanent expulsions, including one elementary school student.

A former Baltimore County teacher sentenced to a year and a half in jail for a sex offense against a 13-year-old student now faces federal child pornography charges, according to U.S. District Court documents. Timothy N. Gounaris, 52, of the first block of Cardor Court in Perry Hall, is scheduled for a detention hearing Monday. Gounaris was arrested Friday after the FBI found evidence that he was sharing image and video files of "minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct" on the Internet, court documents said.

The heat is on for students returning to the daily grind of classwork next week, and there may be no place in Maryland where that's more true than at Timonium's Ridgely Middle School. Thanks to a recent $13 million renovation, returning Ridgely students can look forward to new windows, air handlers and lowered ceilings that have turned their school from a somewhat uncomfortable place on hot and humid days to a veritable sauna with no off switch. Whenever the outside temperatures hit the 80s, Ridgely teachers report, the second floor reliably reaches the 90s and above - could it be any other way with insulated windows that either won't open or can be opened only slightly?

When Baltimore County school officials would not let the track team at the all-black Sollers Point High School in Dundalk run time trials at the all-white school up the road, their coach decided to make his own track. J. Bruce Turner hitched a metal bedspring to the rear fender of his old Plymouth. He piled cinder blocks - and a few students - on top. And he drove his car around the oval pattern that he and the school's math teacher had plotted until the dirt was flat enough and smooth enough to serve as a makeshift track.

A 22-year-old college student who was pulled out of class in New York last week and arrested in the fatal shooting of a Woodlawn teenager nearly six years ago waived extradition yesterday at a brief hearing on Long Island, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office there said. Nicholas Dudley Pinderhughes Weaver of Baltimore will be held without bail at the Nassau County Jail in New York until Maryland authorities pick him up, said Eric F. Phillips, a spokesman for the Nassau County district attorney.

Nicholas Dudley Pinderhughes Weaver's resume lists his schooling at Baltimore's Mount St. Joseph High School, work done with HIV-infected children in Africa and the steps he has taken toward a career in the law. He was an Eagle Scout, an acolyte at his church and, most recently, a student at a private university in New York. But Weaver, 22, was pulled Thursday from a science class at Adelphi University and arrested in the fatal shooting of a teenager on a Woodlawn street nearly six years ago. Former Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, a family friend, said he was stunned by the news.

The yellow buses hauling Maryland's suburban and rural students to public school are going 25 percent farther than they did 15 years ago and at more than twice the cost, according to an anti-sprawl group, which contends that poorly planned development is partly to blame. In a report released yesterday, 1000 Friends of Maryland says bus fleets in the state's counties traveled more than 117 million miles last year, with some counties experiencing increases in overall mileage of 30 percent to 50 percent since 1992.

A former teacher who had been hired by Baltimore City schools after leaving the Baltimore County school system amid questions about his relationship with a 13-year-old student entered a guilty plea yesterday to a charge of committing a sex offense against the girl. Timothy Nicholas Gounaris, 50, entered an Alford plea, in which a defendant concedes that prosecutors have sufficient evidence for a conviction but does not admit guilt, to a third-degree sex offense charge. In exchange, prosecutors dropped five of the six charges - including second-degree rape and perverted practice - lodged against the former teacher at Pine Grove Middle School in Carney.

Annapolis High School freshman Conner Toomey was getting ready for school yesterday when his father, just back from walking the dog, told him classes were canceled because of the light-but-steady snow that blanketed the area. Conner, who was eager to break in the Nintendo Wii he received last week for his 15th birthday, welcomed the news. His mother wasn't so thrilled. "The kids lose focus on what they are studying, especially in the back half of the year when the focus is on gearing up for HSAs," Pam Toomey said, referring to the High School Assessment tests required for graduation.