Calverton

Don't cut the life line for state teensThe plan to cut funding to the Youth Services Bureaus [as a result of the state deficit] is absolutely unacceptable. These centers save the lives of our youth daily, as surely as lives are saved at the Shock Trauma Unit. I can only hope that this unthinkable threat is merely a ploy to redirect the energies of the state budget watchdogs.If this proposal is allowed to go into effect, I know from personal experience, as a veteran educator of at-risk youth, that the loss of counseling advocacy and nurturing provided by centers such as the Northwest Baltimore Youth Services Agency will mean that hundreds of youngsters will be without their life support system as of Feb. 2. The economic impact will be shifted to the detention centers, prisons, shelters and health-care providers.

Although her work was cleaning up after people all day, Earlene McFadden always told her family that she loved her job as a custodian at Calverton Middle School because she liked being around children.And it was there, in one of the classrooms, that she was fatally wounded by a man with a knife.Mrs. McFadden, 57, died Friday after being attacked about 5 p.m. in a classroom in the West Baltimore school where police believe she surprised a burglar who may have been hoping to steal money raised by children in a candy sale.

Leroy McFadden was shocked and confused yesterday as he tried to figure out why anyone would want to kill his wife as she did her job cleaning classrooms in a West Baltimore middle school."

All local beer lovers know of the colorful 1879 statue of King Gambrinus, "the patron saint of brewers," which stood in a niche for years above a door of the old J. F. Wiessner Brewery in the 1700 block of N. Gay St., beckoning passersby to enjoy a cold one. It now rests in the Maryland Historical Society. But how about raising a chilled mug to the idea of erecting a statue to Irish immigrant John J. Fitzgerald? "Who's that?" you're probably asking yourself. My column several weeks ago, about the return of legal beer to Baltimore after partial repeal of the despised Volstead Act in 1933, brought an e-mail and later a phone call from Abbie Fitzgerald McCormack Flynn Sullivan Schaub, who lives in Laurel and is the granddaughter of John J. Fitzgerald.

Consumer Dental Care, a dental insurance plan with headquarters in Calverton and 100,000 members in the state, will be acquired by DentaQuest Ventures Inc. of Massachusetts. Consumer Dental's staff and management will continue to operate as DentaQuest's mid-Atlantic region providers, Fay Donohue-Rolfe, executive vice president of DentaQuest's parent firm, said yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Members will "still have the same dentist, still have the same card, still have the same price - they'll have the same everything," she said.

Right-hander Emily Weiman got the No. 3 Archbishop Spalding softball team off to a perfect start. Weiman (1-0) pitched a perfect game, 15 strikeouts in five innings, as the visiting Cavaliers shut out Calvert County opponent Calverton, 20-0. Offensively, Weiman went 3-for-3 with a double and a home run.

When Tanya Green was tapped to turn around the once-beleaguered Calverton Middle School in 2008, she paid close attention to not only what the staff in her school had to say about their barriers, but how they said it -- or sometimes what they failed to say at all. She noticed if they referred to students as, "these kids," or "the children. " She noticed whether they took responsibility for their students' failures, or transferred it on someone else. She took note of whether a teacher was as concerned about whether their students had lunch as they were about their test scores.

Richard Holley, a retired city middle school principal who became an advocate for Frederick Douglass High School, died of cancer April 19 at Gilchrist Hospice Care. He was 74 and lived in Northwest Baltimore. Born in Baltimore and raised in the Sandtown neighborhood of West Baltimore, he attended the Coppin Demonstration School and Booker T. Washington Junior High and was a 1953 graduate of Douglass High School. He earned a degree in Spanish from Morgan State College and his master's degree from Towson University.

Sitting upright and alert on her hospital bed's white sheets, Keonya Christian-Cannon was still in her rainbow-heart pajamas, but she was ready to go home. Keonya, 14, had been recuperating at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center for more than a month, after a stray bullet struck her as she walked across the street from a park near her West Baltimore home. The bullet tore into her abdomen, just below her rib cage. She is one of at least 280 people - 50 of them juveniles - who have been shot, but not killed, in the city this year and a painful example of the many who survive, virtually unnoticed by a city struggling with a surging homicide toll.

Montgomery County and the state announced plans yesterday to create two business parks for science and technology companies, bringing the number of government-backed bioscience parks being considered in Maryland to at least five - including two in Baltimore. Montgomery County is home to more than 200 of the state's roughly 300 biotechnology companies. The proposals come just as Baltimore begins planning parks to attract the same kinds of businesses. Montgomery County Economic Development Director David W. Edgerley acknowledged yesterday that the new parks, modeled after the successful - and now full - Shady Grove Life Sciences Center in Rockville, could compete for tenants with Baltimore.