Centers

Police Commissioner Thomas C. Frazier used some facts about inner-city life to spice up a sales pitch last night to Baltimore's corporate community for contributions to the Police Athletic League."

The city Police Department is reaching out to local businesses, hoping to forge partnerships that will enrich its growing Police Athletic League centers with corporate volunteers.The goal is to pair each of the 27 PAL centers with a business that will offer children teachers, mentors and supplies. Fifteen businesses have signed on to the program.It is similar to a partnership established between the Greater Baltimore Committee -- a group of top business leaders -- and city schools, which brings volunteers into the learning institutions daily.

The Police Department and the Greater Baltimore Committee kicked off a program yesterday that aims to provide corporate support for city youths and help stop juvenile crime.The program links businesses with Police Athletic League centers, which offer after-school education and activities for youths. The businesses will participate in PAL centers in various ways, including funding projects, holding classes, donating items and providing mentors."What we're hoping to do is foster continuous relationships," said Mindy Mintz, director of public safety policy at the GBC, which focuses on improving the business climate through civic leadership.

STARTING TOMORROW, most vehicle owners in the state must put their automobiles through a controversial treadmill test (the dynamometer) as part of the required two-year emissions inspection program. Previously, the treadmill test had been voluntary. Yet judging from the half-million motorists who have already experienced the dynamometer, it's no big deal.The chief beneficiaries of this change will be all who breathe in the state. The very young, the elderly and the 600,000 Marylanders with respiratory problems are most vulnerable to auto-caused smog.

It takes tough love to make tender kids.Just ask the people who staff Baltimore County's five alternative centers -- small schools where chronically disruptive students go when they've run out of chances."

Sylvan Learning Systems Inc., negotiating with Baltimore officials to double the number of tutoring centers it operates in nTC city schools, must show proof of the centers' effectiveness to win a city contract for expansion.Sylvan and school officials are seeking city approval to expand from 14 centers to 29 centers serving more than 4,000 students. Six centers are to open by tomorrow.Wednesday, the Board of Estimates postponed action on the full $9 million, three-year contract, calling on school and Sylvan officials to document student progress at the existing centers before asking for more.

They are religious sanctuaries without steeples, stained glass or permanently placed symbols, "interfaith centers" shared by congregations of every stripe. They were a unique tenet of Columbia's planners, but after 25 years they're drawing decidedly mixed reviews.The Howard County planned community still has America's largest concentration of interfaith centers -- four serving 14 congregations -- but now congregations are sidestepping the social experiment in cross-religion sharing and tolerance.

Sylvan Learning Systems Inc. earned brief mention in a prominent newspaper this week, but it was not an endorsement company officials needed or wanted.The references to the Columbia-based tutoring firm are in the unsettling words of a killer -- buried deep in the rambling, 35,000-word manifesto of the man known as Unabomber.The mysterious writer who rails against technology's effect on modern society says Sylvan's work as well as other educational methods are related to "the assertion of control over the human mind."

A new state panel examining the impact of outpatient surgery centers that are not part of hospitals wants to halt the growth of such centers while it considers the issue.A six-month moratorium on approvals for new centers, if agreed to by the Maryland Health Resources Planning Commission next month, would be the opening move of the Health Planning and Strategy Committee, a panel formed Jan. 12 by the commission and composed of some of its members.The proposed hiatus, which will go before the full commission Feb. 8, has come under stiff criticism from doctors, insurance companies and others who are trying to establish a presence in a shifting marketplace.

A growing number of Maryland doctors have announced intentions to open their own office-based centers for endoscopy and other medical procedures used in their specialty.The reason is that insurance companies are directing care away from more expensive hospitals, and doctors who don't have an alternative service center lined up could find themselves dropped by many health insurers.In the past two months, about 35 doctors or groups of doctors have applied for exemptions from state regulations in order to conduct procedures in their offices that can be performed without anesthesia or a sterilized environment.

In my first homily as the new archbishop of Baltimore, I made a firm and abiding commitment: "To all of those in crisis pregnancies, I pledge our support and our financial help. Let us walk with you through your time of trouble and find a new life with your child, or let us help you place that child in a loving home. But please, I beg you: Let us help you affirm life. Abortion need not be an 'answer' in this archdiocese." Sadly, we can't even agree that birth is a preferable option to abortion.

STANLEY H. KAPLAN, 90 Test preparation company founder The founder of the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers Ltd., who built the nation's first test preparation company, has died. He was 90. Stanley H. Kaplan passed away from natural causes Sunday at his home in New York City. He started his company from his parents' Brooklyn home in 1938; it later became a chain of more than 100 centers nationally. In 1984 he sold it to The Washington Post Co. Kaplan, rejected from medical school, believed that students should have access to higher education based on their capabilities, not connections.

Today, Baltimore's Police Athletic League centers will shut down and, in most cases, will be reborn. The police will leave, though they'll stay for one or two more weeks to ease the transition as 16 of 18 centers become one with the city's Department of Recreation and Parks. City officials announced the end back on March 18, but residents fought back at budget hearings and in gyms where city leaders let them speak but timed them using red, yellow and green traffic signals. Residents pleaded over and over again that officers made all the difference, as protectors and role models, when they shed uniforms and donned sweats and mentored kids and organized field trips and helped with homework and coached soccer and kept vulnerable youths off the street and out of trouble.

Facing a $65 million shortfall in next year's budget, Mayor Sheila Dixon has warned she may have to cut back the hours or close some libraries and neighborhood recreational centers to balance the books. That's especially painful during an economic downturn, when demand for these services generally goes up as people seek less-expensive alternatives to ticketed cultural and sports events. If cuts become necessary, they should be part of an overall strategic plan to strengthen these institutions over the long term, not just respond to the current crisis.

If it's been a long time between vacations, you might feel as though you are chained to work and home responsibilities. For the 300,000 Americans who suffer kidney failure and need dialysis, that tethered feeling is a reality: Without blood-cleansing treatments, they can't survive. But that doesn't mean they can't take a vacation. In fact, it's encouraged, as long as a dialysis patient is in stable health and other health issues are under control, says Dr. Leslie Spry, a nephrologist in Lincoln, Neb., and a spokesman for the National Kidney Foundation, based in New York.

To meet the demands of a burgeoning over-60 population, Carroll County officials are planning two new senior centers and an addition to the county's largest senior facility, in Westminster. In the next five years, the county expects to build centers in North and South Carroll to replace sites where population and participation have outstripped space. The commissioners agreed yesterday to increase the size of those facilities by nearly 5,000 square feet each, a decision that could add more than $1 million to the construction costs.

The Baltimore-based parent of the ubiquitous Sylvan tutoring centers saw its stock price jump 9 percent in the first day of trading yesterday, after an initial public offering that netted the company about $49 million. Educate Inc., which offers tutoring services in centers, online and, more recently, in schools, intends to use the proceeds to pay down the debt it incurred when it bought the businesses from another Baltimore company. The stock, priced at $11 a share, hit the Nasdaq stock market at more than $12 shortly before noon and then edged downward before closing at $11.99.

Baltimore residents who want to apply for energy assistance at six community centers will not be turned away, even though the city is trying to consolidate that function at one location, officials said yesterday. The policy appeared to be a change from a recent plan to stop accepting the applications at the centers and begin taking them only at 2700 N. Charles St. City officials said yesterday that they never planned to turn anyone away at the centers, an impression that Mayor Martin O'Malley said was created by "mistruths" and "falsehoods" spread by state officials.

Clinging to the sheer face of a wall more than 30 feet above ground, April Camlin craned her head toward the sky. With the cautious deliberation of a chess player, she stretched one hand upward, grasping at an outcropping no larger than a tennis ball. The move allowed her to shift her feet and with one final push, reach the top of the 34-foot wall. Camlin, 19, of Baltimore, was one of more than a dozen Towson University students suspended in midair on a recent afternoon at the school's hottest recreational attraction -- its two three-story climbing walls.

Baltimore police are taking over the day-to-day operations of 18 Police Athletic League recreation centers from a nonprofit organization that no longer can handle running the program, city officials said yesterday. Mayor Martin O'Malley and Police Commissioner Kevin P. Clark said residents will notice no changes in the centers, which are scattered throughout the city. "It's about the kids, and we're not going to close any centers," O'Malley said. The takeover from the nonprofit Police Athletic League Inc. is expected to begin soon.