Calvert School

A genteel group, the unlikeliest of public protesters, picketed the Calvert School in North Baltimore this week while parents lined up in their Volvos and sport utility vehicles to drop off and pick up their children. Most were older than age 60, people you might see at a museum, an antique show or a country bed-and-breakfast. In short, folks who were not used to worrying about the roof over their heads - until lately. They took to the streets to protest the school's plans to buy and raze their apartments at 4300 N. Charles St. for a new middle school and two athletic fields.

First thing every morning in the Calvert School, Head Master Merrill S. Hall III shakes hands with each arriving pupil, his smile sometimes accompanied by a gentle but firm reminder to take off a hat, tuck in a shirt or add "Mr. Hall" to the child's greeting. Instilling social graces is part of the culture at the North Baltimore school, with how to write thank-you notes, or "friendly letters," a subject for 10-year-old boys and girls. Curtsies used to go with the handshake for girls and were only dispensed with in 1990.

Merrill S. Hall III, headmaster at the Calvert School in North Baltimore for the past 20 years, is leaving the job at the end of the 2003-2004 school year. Hall, 57, said yesterday that he is planning to take a year off and spend time in Maine, where he and his wife own a house on a lake. After that, he said, he might decide to pursue a job as an interim headmaster, which would allow him the opportunity to see other parts of the country. "You know when it's time to leave," Hall said of his job at Calvert School.

Ana Garcia-Moreno spent three days carefully crafting a composition about her grandparents - how much they mean to her and the activities she likes to share with them. But the exercise wasn't over when the writing stopped. There were corrections to be made - an important part of the writing process at the Calvert School. So 8-year-old Ana stood quietly in the classroom and watched her teacher, Kathy Agley, go over her 1 1/2 -page essay line by line. Agley erased the contraction haven't, and Ana replaced it with the words have not. Then Agley explained that sailboat is a compound word, not two words as Ana had written.

The conflict over Calvert School's expansion appears headed for resolution today as the North Baltimore private school goes before the city planning commission armed with what it badly needs to win design approval: an agreement from the Tuscany-Canterbury Neighborhood Association not to oppose the project. Robert J. Mathias, a lawyer and newly elected president of Calvert's board of trustees, said yesterday that he hoped the agreement marks the beginning of better relations "in a much more harmonious and cooperative spirit" with the school's neighborhood.

The building at the corner of Chase and Morton streets in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood was the first permanent home of the Calvert School. It later became offices for the company that invented the antiseptic Mercurochrome. Now it's up for sale and appears likely to be reborn as Baltimore's newest condominium complex. "We've shown it almost once a day" since it went on the market last month, said Bill Cassidy, sales manager for the Fells Point office of Long and Foster Real Estate and one of the listing agents representing seller Bettyjean Murphy.

Of all the preservation controversies that have erupted in Baltimore this year, none is more complicated or wrenching than the plan by Calvert School to buy and demolish 91 apartments at 4300 N. Charles St. to create a middle school and two playing fields. Calvert's plan doesn't threaten just one historic building. It doesn't affect just one street. The significance of the buildings in question cannot be measured solely by their age or architectural design. In this case, what is at stake is an urban ecosystem that has evolved over the past 35 years.

BALTIMORE'S Carter G. Woodson Elementary School and the Calvert School are eight miles and a world apart.Woodson is a Cherry Hill public school with 90 percent of its students eligible for free lunches. Calvert is a private elementary school in the Tuscany-Canterbury neighborhood serving many of the city's affluent children, with tuition approaching $10,000.Yet on any school day, teachers and students at both schools are engaged in similar activities with the same rigorous, no-nonsense approaches put to the test at Calvert for precisely 100 years.

Calvert School sixth-graders Stacey Collins and Taylor Adams were so excited about moving into their new middle school building yesterday that they had already cleared out their lockers and were waiting in a basement classroom for word to relocate. About 9:45 a.m., carrying backpacks, laptop computers and a shopping bag filled with gym clothes, basketball shoes and a dry-erase board, the two 12-year-olds linked arms as they walked along a paved pathway to the new building. Led by a bagpiper playing "Amazing Grace," the entire school of nearly 400 pupils, faculty and staff joined the parade to the three-story building for a ceremonial ribbon-cutting.

EXPECT A hot time in Tuscany-Canterbury this weekend.The Calvert School -- a centerpiece of the North Baltimore community -- is celebrating its 100th birthday, and instead of partying at the Convention Center or a downtown hotel, the school rented the biggest tent it could find -- a 220-by-100-foot beauty from Loane Bros. It hired an orchestra and invited 1,000 guests to celebrate under the big top.Virgil Mores Hillyer, Calvert's headmaster from 1899 to 1931, probably would have approved.