Community Support

The top rung of the fence has been repaired. Peggy Ingles, a national champion rider in horse shows, stops to look, and she doesn't flinch. "That's where it happened," she says, as if she were pointing out the place where she got a splinter, not where she lost her ability to walk and lift her arms. Two months after being thrown from a horse - and breaking her neck - Ingles is back on her Monkton farm. This homecoming, on a recent Monday, would be too brief, more of a field trip, really.

WASHINGTON - Members of the military and their families say the Defense Department did not send enough troops to establish a stable peace in Iraq, according to a poll released yesterday. The military community also said the Bush administration has relied too heavily on inadequately prepared National Guard and reserve forces. Even so, members of the military on active duty and their families favored President Bush over Sen. John Kerry by a nearly 3-to-1 margin, according to the National Annenberg Election Survey.

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - On Wednesday, Spc. Phil McIlroy came home from Iraq. Yesterday, the 22-year-old visited a stone marker here bearing the name of a friend in the 82nd Airborne Division who died in an ambush last year when both were in Afghanistan. McIlroy has heard news reports about the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He has been told that one of the accused Cumberland-based reservists, Pvt. Lynndie England, is at nearby Fort Bragg awaiting possible charges. To McIlroy, the abuse of prisoners is plain wrong and, based on his stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, rare.

Even before the Baltimore County executive arrives in Catonsville tonight for another in his series of neighborhood roundtable discussions, civic leaders said the visit has sparked a renewed sense of cooperation in the west-side community. The business, neighborhood and religious leaders who are slated to participate in a panel discussion said that in preparing for James T. Smith Jr.'s arrival, they identified common challenges, such as the need for more after-school programs and aid for senior citizens, and assets that include good schools, a robust housing market and strong business districts.

Fifty years have passed since St. Joan of Arc Catholic School opened its doors in Aberdeen, and this year, the little school is finding good reasons to be proud of its progress. Harry and Barbara Webster of Aberdeen, Eucharistic ministers and volunteers to the church and school, have had seven children and 13 grandchildren attend St. Joan of Arc. The children received quality schooling, Harry Webster said, while establishing Christian values. "The children not only get an education but also maintain their faith," he said.

Students in Anne Arundel middle and high schools might soon have a new reason to behave: avoiding the disciplinary measure of being "shadowed" by their parents at school for a day. That idea was recommended in a report submitted to the county school board last week by a task force reviewing disciplinary measures. Task-force members think it could help cut down on offenses such as students skipping school, cutting class, committing forgery and damaging school property. "You have to figure out what you can do to get attention, and sometimes the standard disciplinary actions aren't what gets the attention of today's kids," said Frank Wise, a member of the task force that drafted the new Code of Student Conduct.

The Harford County school system has reversed its decision to transfer Johnny Brooks, a popular teacher and football and basketball coach, from Havre de Grace High School to Bel Air High School. The decision to void the transfer came the day after Havre de Grace residents turned out at a school board meeting Monday evening to express their support for Brooks. Brooks was a Maryland's Tomorrow teacher at Havre de Grace. Maryland's Tomorrow, started by Comptroller William Donald Schaefer when he was governor, was a state intervention program offering academic and personal support to students who experience difficulty in high school.

A plan approved last week to tackle the problem of excessive traffic on Baltimore County's residential streets is likely to disappoint more people than it satisfies in the short term, officials acknowledge, because the county has limited funds for it and a desire to avoid the backlash that has accompanied traffic calming elsewhere. The county's Department of Public Works has a list of more than 80 streets from one end of the county to the other where residents have sought traffic calming, and that's just the places where people have known where to send requests.

The Joppatowne community is set to rally around its flagging shopping center Feb. 23 in hopes of attracting a new grocery store to the plaza at U.S. 40 and Joppa Farm Road. The event is set to begin at 2 p.m. in the plaza parking lot, where those who attend can sign petitions asking for a new grocery store and revitalization of the shopping center. The rally had been scheduled for today but was changed because of inclement-weather forecasts. The building that housed a grocery store has been closed for several years, and Kmart has announced plans to close its 105,000-square-foot store in the spring.

The fava bean plants at Beckie and Jack Gurley's tiny farm in Sparks stand only 6 inches tall. The crop won't be ready to harvest for another five weeks, but the bulk of it has already been bought and paid for. It's all part of a different approach to farming known as community-supported agriculture, CSA for short. CSA can be traced to 1960s Japan, and it didn't make its way to this country until a Massachusetts woman tried it in the mid-1980s. CSA works like this: By making an investment of about $450, the consumer buys a share of a CSA farmer's weekly harvest.