Days Of School

Forty minutes after arriving at her office at West Middle School last week, Sherry G. Pyles finally got a chance to take her coat off.Besieged by requests for help from students, administrators and teachers, Pyles turned away from the pedal-to-the-metal lifestyle of a pupil personnel worker in Carroll County's school system only to tell everyone to allow her to remove her wrap."

Mark Stern is like a ghost at Canton Middle School.The 13-year-old's name is on Canton's rolls, and each morning a yellow bus brings him from home to the school's front steps.But when the 7: 55 bell rings to begin classes, chances are Mark has disappeared: He ditched 100 days of school last year, and is well on his way to smashing that mark this year."They keep saying he walks in one door and goes out another every morning," said his mother, Doris Stern. "He doesn't even know his teachers' names."

In an attempt to eradicate the affliction of truancy in Southeast Baltimore, police and officials at Canton Middle School announced a plan of attack last night that they believe will get real results -- punish the parents."

THERE AREN'T MANY days left to kick back before diving back into the carpooling whirl of back to school, back to sports practices, back to everything.But time remains to check out laid-back summer events.Solley United Methodist Church will hold its annual midweek peach festival from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday on the church grounds, 7600 Solley Road.Peach desserts, beef barbecue, homemade crab soup, hot dogs, and other desserts and goodies will be served by church members.Tickets for the peach dessert, including homemade cake, ice cream and a drink, are $3.50 for adults, and $2 for children younger than 12. Carryouts are $3.50.

The proposed school calendar for the 1998-1999 school year is bound to please no one, school officials say.Students will begin classes in August but will still have to go to school through June 17, thanks to a late Labor Day, two election days, an added parent-teacher conference day and teacher training days that are scheduled throughout the year instead of packed in the week before school starts."

The Howard County school board approved last week a calendar for the 1997-1998 school year that will take days out of teachers' and students' spring vacations if next winter is particularly severe.The board also was told of anticipated changes in the daily opening and closing times of six elementary and two middle schools for next fall.Under the new calendar, classes will begin Aug. 25 and end June 9. The first day for teachers will be Aug. 19.The calendar calls for the first day of winter break to be Dec. 24, with students returning to school Jan. 5.Spring break will begin officially April 10, and schools will reopen April 20. Students also will be off April 9 and will have a half day of classes April 8 to allow for spring parent-teacher conferences.

For Howard County Superintendent Michael E. Hickey, the opening bell on the first day of school rang at 5: 45 a.m. That's when he showed up in his office yesterday.By the time pupils answered their first bell at 7: 30 a.m., Hickey had already been at Columbia's Wilde Lake High School for some time, meeting administrators, teachers and students.By 9: 30, he had visited two other high schools and two elementaries and planned to hit 10 more campuses by the end of the school day."Exhausting?" asked Hickey, in the midst of his 14th opening day in Howard County schools.

AH, THE LAST DAYS of school. The children have made it through another year of what is the best time of their lives -- even if they haven't yet realized it. They're anxiously awaiting that last ride home on the "the big yellow cheese" and looking forward to a summer of freedom.Before the close of school, I thought I'd talk about the neat things youths in southeastern Carroll have been doing lately.Sixth-graders in Ann Kienzle's homeroom at Sykesville Middle School have a right to hold their heads high.

With only a few days' warning that school would be open Presidents Day as a snow makeup day, Baltimore County teachers and students scrambled to cancel doctors appointments, ski trips and family gatherings set for the long weekend.And for the most part, they showed up in classrooms yesterday, though some schools reported unusually high absenteeism.Last week's sudden notice sent some principals hustling to find substitute teachers. The fill-ins were even more difficult to find than usual, because neighboring counties had scheduled Presidents Day classes much earlier, tapping the scarce supply.

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- A strange hysteria appears to have gripped lower education in America.First there was the Kissing Kid of Lexington, North Carolina. Johnathan Prevette, a first-time-offender first-grader, received an in-school suspension, missing out on playtime and an ice-cream party, after a teacher spotted him kissing a female classmate on the cheek. The charge: sexual harassment. The suspect claimed: ''She asked me to.''Right, kid, that's what they all say.A bear named CorduroyThen, up north in New York City, little De'Andre Dearinge, 7, was forced to miss three days of school after kissing a girl next to him at lunch and pulling a button from her skirt.

State Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick has approved a waiver that will end the Howard County public school year on a Friday instead of a Monday, county Superintendent Sydney L. Cousin announced this week. Inclement weather days used Feb. 13 and 22 were tacked onto the end of the school calendar year, moving the last day of school to June 16. Now, with the waiver approved, it is June 13. The originally scheduled ending date was June 12. The last four days of school will go as follows: June 10 will be a full day for all students, and high school exams will begin.

Baltimore students who were murdered or shot had poor school attendance before they fell victim to the violence, according to new data released yesterday by the school system and health department. Between 2003 and 2007, 115 youths in Baltimore were killed, and 405 were victims of non-fatal shootings, Health Department figures show. The school system was able to retrieve attendance data going back to 1999 for 391 of the 520 total victims. The Health Department pooled the data from the two agencies.

After wringing his hands over final exams last week, rising ninth-grader Miles Kraemer welcomed the down time that came this week with the last two days of school. Instead of having to fret over math, he was able to watch three movies, including Forrest Gump for the first time, play a few hands of cards with friends and sign yearbooks while his teachers packed up classrooms, accounted for missing textbooks, and otherwise prepared to turn in their keys for the summer. "Forrest Gump was kind of educational," Miles, 14, offered in a futile attempt to justify how he and his classmates had wiled away the time at Franklin Middle School in Reisterstown.

Wearing a tank top, jeans and flip-flops, Gi Pak was not prepared for the first day of classes at Arundel High School. The 16-year-old junior was accustomed to the sauna-like conditions in the building during hot, humid weather. But yesterday in the school's cafeteria, she covered her arms with her hands as she shivered. After years of talk about the school's finally getting air conditioning, and 18 months of work, she said, "I didn't believe them when they said we were going to have it."

There was nothing unusual to mark this as Brenda Wright-Harris' final day of teaching. The 54-year-old veteran teacher awoke at 4 a.m. and dressed in slacks, a scoop-necked shirt she could move around in, small hoop earrings and comfortable shoes. She kissed her husband goodbye and drove the 30 minutes from her Randallstown home to James McHenry Elementary School in West Baltimore. In her classroom about 6 a.m., she flicked on the television to the local news and walked around, straightening books and pupils' desks and picking up the odd piece of trash.

THEY CALLED him "Stink." At school in Meriden, Conn., no child would sit near him. Others beat, stomped, spat on and choked him because he was odd and offensive, a state report documents. He rarely bathed or brushed his teeth; he wore mismatched and filthy clothes to school when he went, which wasn't often; and when he was there, he'd defecate or urinate in his pants so he'd be sent home. One teacher reported that when she passed 12-year-old J. Daniel Scruggs in the hallway, she'd always cover her mouth and nose with her hand.

A lot is expected from sixth-graders entering their first year of middle school in Anne Arundel County. As the 11- and 12-year-olds are struggling to make the often-traumatic leap from childhood to early teen-age status, they're expected to behave like little adults: organized, independent and socially correct. To help with this complicated transition and to calm the middle school jitters, each of the county's 16 middle schools has designed an orientation program. "It's important for kids to meet some other kids before school starts," says Bonnie Habicht, a guidance counselor who coordinates Severna Park Middle School's summer orientation workshops for incoming sixth-graders and their parents.

In the wake of a rare Good Friday school day on which more than 40 percent of Carroll County students stayed home, county school officials are reconsidering the way they reschedule class time lost to snow days. "We would think long and hard before we would recommend that we go to school on the Friday before Easter. If I had to do it again ... I'd recommend we extend the school year," Superintendent Charles I. Ecker said yesterday. But school board President Susan G. Holt said she would not favor adding makeup days to the end of the school year.

IT WAS preaching to the choir amid the rubble of the church. Civil rights leaders, researchers, lawyers and students gathered in Chapel Hill, N.C., last weekend for a conference with an interrogatory theme: "The Resegregation of Southern Schools?" Speaker after speaker, researcher after researcher, answered yes, as the conference turned into a long day of mourning for the glory days of school desegregation. The conference sponsors, Harvard's Civil Rights Project and the University of North Carolina's Center for Civil Rights, expected 200, but 500 signed up. I mention the numbers because one observer said those who attended were the last Americans to believe all races benefit when the races are mixed in school.

Many of their names will not be found on honor rolls. They're not among the star athletes who have gleaming trophies in the school's display cases. And few of their pictures will ever hang outside the main office in the Student of the Month showcase. But those were the very kids who North Carroll High School pulled out of class yesterday - 507 of them - for a surprise assembly to recognize them just for being good kids. They're the ones who have missed no more than four days of school in the first seven months of the year.