Columbia Schools

Tomorrow night, the audience at Jim Rouse Theatre in Columbia will watch international ballet stars from the American Ballet Theatre perform selections from famous classical ballets. But to see the hardest job in ballet, say instructors from Columbia's Ballet Royale Institute - which is sponsoring the event - look behind the soloists and watch the corps de ballet move in unison, matching everything from the tilt of their heads to the angle of their feet. "It is difficult to dance in an ensemble," said Svetlana Cravtova, a Ballet Royale instructor who was a professional dancer in Russia before moving to the United States.

An elaborate haunted house complete with a pirate ship and crew, a spooky maze and a skeleton version of the principal is the central attraction at tonight's Halloween festivities at the Columbia campus of Maryland School for the Deaf. The school is one of two state-funded campuses that serve Maryland's deaf and hard-of-hearing children. The other campus is in Frederick. The haunted house is a school tradition, and its details are a yearly surprise for the pupils, said Cheri Dowling, president of the school's Parent-Teacher-Counselor Association.

At Phelps Luck Elementary School in Columbia, staff members are making sure pupils understand the meaning behind a popular saying: People don't plan to fail, but fail to plan. Through its Goal Getters program, the youngsters are learning an early lesson about the importance of setting goals to achieve their dreams. "We're very honest with the students," said Tricia McCarthy, a Phelps Luck guidance counselor who started the program last year with summer school children. "We want them to improve, achieve and accelerate, and we tell them you've got to plan; you've got to set goals."

For 15-year-old Jennifer Bryant, the meaning of Howard County's decades-long celebration of Race Unity Day on Sunday is simple and clear. "It's always going to be important to celebrate racial diversity. If we don't, we get farther and farther apart," the Oakland Mills High School sophomore said. The idea that honoring differences will draw people together has eluded millions of Americans who mostly live and socialize among their own, and send their children to racially separate schools.

Realizing that her shy daughter needed more individual attention and a smaller learning environment, Tristan Rynn pulled Fauston out of first grade at then-Dasher Green Elementary School in Columbia in December 2003 and has been home-schooling her ever since. However, Rynn, a native of Columbia who graduated from its schools, is a firm believer in public schools. "There's no alternative unless you put your kid in private school," she said. So Rynn and other parents are proposing another solution: a charter school in Columbia that would incorporate a child's specific learning style into the curriculum.

WASHINGTON -- The retired three-star Army general is urging a crowd of parents and teachers not to be nervous because a military man has been summoned to take over this city's crumbling public school system.But Lt. Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr. can't get very far before he is interrupted by Doreen Moses, a district schoolteacher. "We're for it!" she yells from her seat at a neighborhood meeting. "We're not fretful at all."On this night, few folks seem to mind that Becton has taken charge of the city's 157 public schools.

A grand jury indicted a 51-year-old JROTC instructor at a Howard County high school who was charged with having sex with a 17-year-old female student in a school supply closet, police said. Sgt. Charles Ray Moore of Bowie, who police said had sexual contact with a senior member of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Atholton High School in Columbia over a two-day period in May, was indicted by the Howard County grand jury Wednesday. Moore, of the 3100 block of Aventine Lane, was charged with sexual child abuse and sexual child abuse by a person in a position of authority in May, after the teen's mother reported the incidents to officials, Howard County police said.

Principal Sterlind Burke is a big man with a big job. The educator, with a build like a football lineman, is top administrator at Patuxent Valley Middle School in Columbia. When he arrived in 1996, Burke said, "I came in here as a very different person for this community ... ethnically ... style-wise. ... I wanted [them] to see part of me beyond the guy who came in basically to be the strict disciplinarian, to reorganize the school. "They needed to know that they were dealing with someone who had a sense of faith that was ... open to all people, that supported all people.

John Hannay knew that Running Brook Elementary's new bully-proofing program was working when he overheard his son tell a friend, "You have to think about other people's feelings and how they're going to feel when you do that." "He was using language ... he must have gotten at school," Hannay said of his son, Stefan, a third-grader at Running Brook. According to school psychologist Gina Santoro, Running Brook's focus on bully-proofing is not the result of a bullying problem, but it recognizes an issue with which all schools deal.