Calvert School

Overcome by a roaring fire in her Roland Park home, an 11-year-old girl died at Sinai Hospital yesterday after being pulled from the flames by Baltimore firefighters, while her 16-year-old brother clung to life in the same medical center. Their father, Stephen A. Young, a deputy copy desk chief at The Sun, was found outside the front door. Choking, he managed to tell firefighters that his children were trapped inside, a city Fire Department spokesman said. Young was rushed to Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he was in critical condition and stable last night, recovering from a broken hip and suffering from smoke inhalation.

Mary Windsor "Molly" Harris, a Calvert School second-grader who enjoyed ballet and spending time at the beach, died of pneumonia Sunday at Sinai Hospital. The 8-year-old Ruxton resident developed breathing problems after contracting what appeared to be a cold, her family said. Born in Denver, Molly was an infant when her family moved to Ruxton in 1999. "I've known Molly since kindergarten. She was an amazing child with a huge heart. Her contagious smile could brighten the gloomiest of days.

John William McCleary, the strict but gentlemanly tennis coach at what is now Towson University for four decades, died in his sleep Thursday at Blakehurst Life Care Community. He was 93.Mr. McCleary, who also taught European history at the York Road school, was known as a demanding coach during his tenure from 1947 to 1988. For about 30 years, he was head coach."He was a very strong-willed person who expected a lot out of his athletes," said his brother, Standish McCleary of Guilford. "He was a taskmaster who was adamant about making people do what they were were supposed to do."

" 'Are You My Mother?' by P.D. Eastman. I think what's so interesting about this story is that the little baby can not find his mother. The little baby who was lost had to find his mother but he couldn't, so he went looking for her."-- Jamia AndersonCherry Hill Elementary"If you are looking for underwater books, then read 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' by Jules Verne. I like the part when the Nautilus sub got stuck on the iceberg, but my favorite part was when a giant squid attacked the sub. This book is a chapter book and I like to read chapter books."

Eager to give their students a leg up in the vast domain of computer technology, some private schools in the Baltimore area are requiring parents to buy laptops, much as they do pencils and spiral notebooks.It's an emerging nationwide trend at costly private schools, an expensive leap from school labs where youngsters must compete for research time on a bank of computers. Instead, pupils as young as 9 or 10 are tapping into the Internet at their desks, obtaining material from the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian Institution.

At first glance, the most recent test scores from Baltimore's elementary schools look like the vital signs of a patient in intensive care.Thousands of the city's public school students progressed only a few months in their 180 days, and many schools seemed to slump in the second grade.The results for some grades so depressed school board President J. Tyson Tildon that he remarked: "I want to cry."But take a closer look, some experts said yesterday, and the patient's vital signs may not be critical.

Keith Shane Miceli, 22, student at Loyola CollegeA memorial service for Keith Shane Miceli, a Loyola College honors student who drowned Thursday in the Little Gunpowder Falls, will be held at 4 p.m. tomorrow at St. Paul's School, 11152 Falls Road in Brooklandville.Mr. Miceli, 22, a lifelong Parkville resident who was to have graduated today, slipped into the water while walking a dog alongside the stream.A mathematics major, he received the college's outstanding service and senior achievement awards for mathematical sciences, was listed in Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges, and was a member of Pi Mu Epsilon, a national mathematics honors society.

At the corner of Tuscany and Canterbury roads -- among the high-rise apartments and redbrick townhouses -- stands an Elizabethan half-timber and a modern Tudor-influenced structure. What they represent is an anomaly in this changing city community.Go to the former on a weekend night, and you'll see Johns Hopkins University students dimming the party lights of the three-story fraternity house at 3906 Canterbury, with the sounds of alternative bands permeating the streets.Go to the latter on a weekday afternoon, and you'll experience a two-block line of double-parked station wagons and minivans lined up in front of the Calvert School on Tuscany, with anxious mothers honking and children playing on the curb.

THE VOICE OF LAURA Ingalls Wilder continues to sweep across America like the prairie wind she wrote about, though she's been dead for 41 years."We're in the third generation of Wilder's books," says Ann Weller Dahl, in her 27th year as a teacher at Baltimore's Calvert School, "and as far as I'm concerned there'll be a fourth and a fifth. Wilder combines reading skills, history and values that are being ignored in much of education."Other authors and other series from the past remain popular among young people, but you won't find Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys in the Calvert School curriculum.

Thousands of Baltimore's elementary students gleaned only a few months of learning from 180 days in city classrooms last year, according to results of a critical twice-a-year reading and math test the school board will use to evaluate everything from student progress to teacher and principal performance.The poor showings were a disappointment -- if not a total surprise -- to school board members, who are in their second year of major reform efforts and had hoped to see more signs of improvement.

The former home of the company that invented the Ouija board, the estate of Calvert School's first headmaster and one of the city's last Masonic temples are among 12 buildings that have joined Baltimore's official landmark list. Marking May as "Preservation Month," Mayor Sheila Dixon held a news conference Wednesday morning at which she signed legislation adding the buildings to the landmark list and opened an exhibit about them in the North Gallery of City Hall. The additions bring to 153 the number of buildings that have individual city landmark designation, a status that helps protect them from demolition or defacement.

Boys' Latin carefully considered demolition The demolition of our middle school building was truly a harrowing experience for the faculty, administration and board of directors of the Boys' Latin School. However, comparing the preservation of Castalia on the Calvert School property to the removal of Jenkins Hall, the Laurence Hall Fowler-designed structure mentioned in the letter "Boys' Latin razes another city treasure" (Nov. 5), is comparing apples and oranges. The decision to remove Jenkins Hall came after more than five years of wrangling over how to upgrade the middle school facilities, even though the house was not historically significant.

Right way to save Mechanic Theatre Thanks to Edward Gunts for pointing to a solution regarding the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre and its uncertain future ("Heightened drama," Aug. 4). The architectural and cultural significance of the building is without question, as affirmed by a unanimous vote for landmark designation by Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) and a flood of testimony from local and national experts. Among historians of architecture and urbanism, Benjamin Latrobe's Basilica of the Assumption is the only building in Baltimore better known beyond the city.

John Sears Gibbs IV, a retired educator who enjoyed spending summers in Maine, died of heart failure Sunday at his Guilford home. He was 72. Mr. Gibbs was born in Baltimore and raised in Roland Park. He was a 1954 graduate of Gilman School and earned a bachelor's degree from Washington & Lee University in 1958. He also held a master's degree from the Johns Hopkins University. He taught second- and third-graders at the Calvert School from 1958 to 1978. In 1979, he joined the faculty of Boys' Latin School, where he taught in the middle school until retiring in 1994.

One year after the leaders of Calvert School told residents of Baltimore's Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood of their plans to seek permission to tear down a former headmaster's residence to make way for an amphitheater, the private school is moving ahead with plans to restore and expand the residence for academic use instead. Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation (CHAP) voted 5-0 yesterday to give conceptual approval to the school's plans to expand Castalia, the 1928 residence at 200 Tuscany Road that noted architect Laurence Hall Fowler designed for Calvert School headmaster Virgil Hillyer.

Carey Street, named after 18th-century port merchant, councilman and Quaker abolitionist James Carey, runs through some of the most challenged neighborhoods of West Baltimore. A mile and a half east in the downtown commercial district stands the gleaming Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which is celebrating this week the inauguration of its first dean, thanks to a $50 million gift in 2006 from William Polk Carey, the merchant's great-great-great-grandson. The New Yorker's commitment to his hometown and family legacy does not end there.

Watching from a New York street as the World Trade Center towers fell, Alex Yaggy knew his younger brother, Marine instructor pilot David Yaggy, would be among the first leading the country's response to the Sept. 11 attacks. "He was going into harm's way on our account," Mr. Yaggy said of his brother's tour of duty in Afghanistan. "I can tell you I was extremely proud of his service for our country, as someone who watched the World Trade Center collapse with my own eyes." Major Yaggy, 34, of Sparks, survived that duty and two tours in Iraq but was killed Friday afternoon on a routine training flight when his plane crashed near Ashville, Ala., about 60 miles northeast of Birmingham.

Calvert School yesterday was prevented from tearing down its first headmaster's residence, known as Castalia, when Baltimore's preservation commission voted to add the property to a "special list" that gives the city panel legal authority to block demolition. Despite objections from the private school, Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation voted, 10-0, to add the building and grounds at 200 Tuscany Road to the "special list" of places it seeks to protect.

Henry Douglas Scriba, a former Calvert School business administrator, died of complications from a stroke Thursday at Oak Crest Village retirement community. He was 85. Mr. Scriba was born in Baltimore and raised near Hollins Market. He graduated from City College in 1940 and served in the Army Air Forces during World War II. In 1948, Mr. Scriba went to work at Calvert School, which offers a home-schooling curriculum that's widely used in this country and abroad. He retired in 1986. While working at Calvert, he earned degrees in business and education from the Johns Hopkins University.

Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation voted yesterday to delay a decision on whether to designate Calvert School's Castalia property a local landmark after the school asked for more time to learn how the designation would affect its plans for expansion. School leaders agreed not to seek a demolition permit or make changes to the exterior of the former headmaster's residence until a March 11 hearing. A local preservation group known as Baltimore Heritage nominated Castalia for landmark listing last fall after the private school sought permission to tear down the house, possibly to make way for an amphitheater.