Eastern High School

Howard County got twice as much state school construction money yesterday -- nearly $12 million -- than it did last year, but county legislators are blaming Del. Virginia Thomas for sacrificing an additional $2 million to election-year grandstanding.The Maryland Board of Public Works yesterday decided to give the county $7.2 million to add to the $4.7 million it approved in January.That was somewhat less than the nearly $14 million that was recommended by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Howard P. Rawlings.

The Baltimore school system will receive $2.6 million this year to help identify troubled youths and prevent violence at 10 city schools under a grant announced yesterday by President Clinton in his weekly radio address.Rep. Elijah E. Cummings delivered the news yesterday at Lake Clifton Eastern High School during a summit with parents, politicians and educators who gathered to brainstorm plans for making classrooms safer and encouraging parents to become a larger part of their children's education.

Lillian Elizabeth Springmann, an elementary school teacher whose career spanned nearly three decades, died of pneumonia Nov. 28 at Franklin Square Hospital. The former longtime Parkville resident was 97. Miss Springmann was born in Baltimore and raised on North Port Street. She was a 1929 graduate of Eastern High School and earned her teacher certification from the old Maryland State Normal School, now Towson University, in 1931. In the 1940s, Miss Springmann began attending night school at the Johns Hopkins University, where she earned her bachelor's degree in education in 1952.

Jeanne B. Volk, a mezzo soprano who performed with her husband in Baltimore-area church choirs for more than 40 years, died March 20 of pancreatic cancer at Hospice of the Valley in Phoenix. She was 81. Jeanne Bond was born in Baltimore into a musical family. Her father, mother and grandfather had studied voice at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. Mrs. Volk, who held the Tiffany Voice Scholarship at the Peabody, was a 1946 graduate of Eastern High School. After graduating from Eastern, she was hired as a soprano soloist at Christ Lutheran Church in South Baltimore, where she met and fell in love with her future husband, Philip Volk, who was tenor soloist in the church choir.

The date was Sept. 14, 1914. All the eyes in Baltimore were fixed on Fort McHenry. It was the 100th anniversary of "The Star-Spangled Banner."It was the day of the Human Flag. Thousands of school children, dressed in either red, white or blue, assembled on the side of a small hill near the fort's walls. They formed a living flag.A few years ago, a Human Flag survivors club was formed to hold a reunion for the original participants. All eight of those able to make it met yesterday at the fort.

For the first time since Eastern High School closed in 1986, I passed by that mighty building and breathed a little easier.The future of the building appears secure. The mighty Johns Hopkins University has expressed interest in developing the site where thousands of Baltimore women were educated.This is not to say the Eastern property is automatically on the road to rebirth. But it sounds like a better idea than converting the site into another shopping center.What a downer the helpless school building has become.

HER NAME IS Kim Williams, and yesterday she started to weep in front of the entire immediate world. She stood there on the stage at City College, at the final assembly of the Class of 2000 before its members graduate and go their separate ways, and when she opened her mouth and got to the words "City College," all language stopped and the tears began to spill. In the big auditorium crowd, nobody moved for a moment. Kim Williams turned from the microphone and tried to compose herself while her classmates waited.

Like skilled cat burglars, teams of college-age hackers slithered past defenses to probe the soft underbelly of a sophisticated computer system. Their mission: to steal secrets and leave an electronic calling card. As they tapped away on laptops and spoke in low voices, knots of educators, business leaders, parents and government officials hovered nearby, smiling and nodding with approval. In the eyes of the organizers of the Maryland Cyber Challenge and Conference, today's hacker could be tomorrow's cybersecurity hero.

The Johns Hopkins University has concluded architectural studies of the former Eastern High School property on East 33rd Street in Baltimore and determined that the building is sound enough to be recycled for educational uses, as it proposed this year.The Schmoke administration in July selected the university, over a group that wanted to build a shopping center, to develop the high school and surrounding property and gave it until Sunday to decide whether to proceed.Hopkins' plan called for the high school, built in 1939 and vacant since 1986, to be recycled at a cost of $11.5 million to be used as academic and administrative space.

The bobbed hairstyles are white now. The once youthful hands are covered with age spots. And many grip canes or walkers.But these women in their late 80s are as high-spirited as when they graduated from Eastern High School in 1926 wearing white dresses and each carrying a single red rose. They still refer to themselves as girls.Yesterday, 13 class members got together at Edenwald retirement center in Towson to celebrate their 70th high school reunion -- a long way from Broadway and North Avenue where the all-girls city school originally was.And a long way from the Roaring '20s, the decade when George Burns and Gracie Allen debuted on radio, the first motion picture with sound was demonstrated and a Model T Ford sold for $350.