Carroll County

A Carroll County man died Sunday when he wrecked his motorcycle on Route 30 in Hampstead, police said. Leonard Thomas Fazio, 48, was driving a 1989 Harley Davidson motorcycle southbound on Route 30 south of Trenton Mill Road around 4 p.m. when he crossed over the double-yellow line and struck a curb on the northbound shoulder, according to Maryland State Police. He was ejected from the motorcycle. Fazio, of the 3700 block of Millers Station Road, was pronounced dead at the scene, police said.

  Gov. Martin O'Malley has appointed Brian David Green to the district court for Carroll County. Green has served as attorney with the Office of the Public Defender in Carroll County for the past 23 years, according to a press release from the governor's office. An adjunct professor for the Criminal Practice Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law, Green has also worked for the Shemer Bar Review since 1999, according to the release. He began his legal career as an assistant state's attorney in Baltimore City from 1987-1990.

    Carroll County's Agricultural Lands Preservation Program has been awarded $618,000 through the Maryland Rural Legacy Program for preserving farmland or natural lands. The county will use the funds to buy conservation easements from willing sellers within designated areas. The easements reserve property from future development, but the land remains in private ownership. The owner is compensated for essentially "retiring" the development potential on the land. The Maryland Rural Legacy Program was created in 1998 to preserve large contiguous areas of rural land.

Brian Drake, an instrumental music teacher and band director at Westminster High School, has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Carroll County Music Educator Award, sponsored by the Music Advocates of Carroll County. The award was scheduled to be presented during the Westminster High School Marching Band Show on Saturday, Oct. 13. Drake has been an instrumental music director at Westminster High School for more than 10 years. During this tenure, the school has been recognized for exceptional ensembles, both outside on the marching field and inside on the concert stage.

A two-vehicle accident in Carroll County left 11 people injured Friday evening. The 5:42 p.m. crash involving a van and another vehicle occurred in the 2900 block of Hampstead-Mexico Road, Route 482. Two adults were transported to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center and a child was flown to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Others were treated at the Carroll Hospital Center for injuries considered not life-threatening. - Jacques Kelly

The early spring snow falling on Carroll County overnight from Sunday into Monday has brought with it an extra vacation day for many local students. Carroll County Public Schools has announced that all public schools in the county are closed Monday due to the inclement weather. CCPS on Monday afternoon announced that a basketball game with the Harlem Wizards, originally scheduled for tonight at Manchester Valley High School, has been postponed until Saturday, April 13, at 7 p.m.  In addition, McDaniel College in Westminster has also closed for the day. The National Weather Service has a winter weather advisory issued for Carroll County through 6 p.m., and is forecasting that parts of the county could receive 3 to 5 inches of snow before the precipitation turns to rain this evening.

I find the statement by Carroll County commissioner Richard Rothschild that "We don't want subways or metro buses" because "they are conduits for crime" ("Carroll commissioners break with past on growth, housing, transit" June 23) to be very short sighted and narrow. Though I am a citizen of Baltimore County, I ride four days a week on the Metro with many Carroll countians. I've been riding the Metro to work since the Owings Mills station opened. Ridership includes many hard working citizens, students, the elderly and handicapped and the occasional homeless person looking for cheap rent for the day. Are there criminals among us?

Carroll County was named as the fifth healthiest place to live in Maryland by a national research group analysis. The report, released April 3, comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. The annual study ranks counties in each state by health factors and socio-economic factors such as employment rates, poverty and crime. Carroll ranked particularly high - No. 3 in the state - in socio-economic factors, which included factors such as violent crime, percentage of single-parent children and high school graduation rates.

Carroll County posted some of the highest scores in the state in the 2012 Maryland State Assessment scores released this week. More than 89 percent of students in Carroll passed the tests in every category but eighth-grade math. MSA exams in reading and math are given to students in the third through eighth grades, and the results are ranked in the categories of basic, proficient and advanced — the latter two of which constitute a passing score. Carroll students also showed improvement from last year in every category except for fourth-grade math, where they nonetheless passed at a rate of 94.6 percent.