Guidance Counselor

Maria Lee Garitee, a retired guidance counselor whose work with handicapped children went far beyond her school duties, died Friday at her home in Towson after a five-year battle with cancer. She was 64.An educator in Baltimore County for 33 years, Mrs. Garitee committed her life to helping others, said her daughter Meridith Muehleib of Fairfax Station, Va."She wasn't satisfied to just get her handicapped students through school, she also worked hard to prepare them for the community and job market after graduating," Mrs. Muehleib said.

Robert F. Fanto, a retired longtime Baltimore County public schools guidance counselor, died of cancer Wednesday at his Timonium home. He was 80. The son of a Baltimore & Ohio Railroad machinist and a homemaker, Mr. Fanto was born in Cumberland and raised in Piedmont, W.Va., and Keyser, W.Va. After graduation in 1949 from Keyser High School, he enlisted in the Navy. He served as a radioman to the commander of the 2nd Fleet in the Atlantic until being discharged in 1953.

Robert J. Hewes, 64, teacher, guidance counselor Robert J. Hewes, who worked for 30 years in Anne Arundel County schools as a high school history teacher, then a guidance counselor, died of pancreatic cancer Friday at his Pasadena home. He was 64. Born in Baltimore and raised in Linthicum Heights, Mr. Hewes was a 1955 Brooklyn Park High School graduate. He earned a bachelor's degree from what is now Towson University and a master's degree in counseling from the Johns Hopkins University.

The Rev. Thomas Walsh, a Franciscan friar and pastor of a Rosedale congregation who had been the longest-serving Archbishop Curley High School religious faculty member, died of a heart attack Saturday at Union Memorial Hospital. He was 60. The pastor of the Roman Catholic Church of the Annunciation, he had spent more than 25 years as a teacher and guidance counselor at the Northeast Baltimore boys school, which will be closed Friday to honor his life and to allow students to attend his funeral.

Grayce E. Sadofsky, a retired school guidance counselor and former registered nurse, died Tuesday of pulmonary disease at her Cape St. John home, near Annapolis. She was 81. Miss Sadofsky was born in Baltimore, the daughter of German immigrant parents, and graduated in 1938 from Western High School. She was a graduate of the old South Baltimore General Hospital School of Nursing, then earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland School of Nursing in the early 1940s. Miss Sadofsky taught practical nursing at Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School (Mervo)

Sidney Mossovitz, a Carroll Community College administrator and former Baltimore County public schools educator, died Wednesday night at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center after he and a friend were struck by a car in Pikesville. He would have been 56 yesterday.The Chambersburg, Pa., native moved his family to Maryland to become a teacher.He taught history and social studies at Baltimore County schools before becoming a guidance counselor at Old Court Junior High School.He became vice principal at Randallstown High School in 1977, and held the same position at Pikesville High from 1991 to 1994.

Anna Baginski, who served in the Navy as a nurse at the end of World War II and later worked as a school guidance counselor in Baltimore County for 20 years, died of complications from Alzheimer's disease Oct. 30 at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. She was 87. Anna Spock was born in Kulpmont, Pa., to parents who had emigrated from Ukraine. She attended public schools in the town and, upon graduating from high school, went to the Geisinger School of Nursing in Danville, Pa. She graduated in 1942 and taught at the school for a few years before joining the Navy Nurse Corps in early 1945.

Steve Leonard Morris, a high school guidance counselor, collapsed and died Friday of a heart attack at Howard County's Long Reach High School. The Ellicott City resident was 48. "He was the epitome of the solid guidance counselor and a very important part of our learning environment. There's not a person, either faculty or student, who did not like Steve," said Long Reach Principal Ed Evans. "He was a fatherly figure who always made you feel like you were the most important person around, that your well-being was more important than his own. He was a truly nice and loving man."

Warren Allison Ledford, a retired Baltimore public schools guidance counselor and teacher, died of complications related to prostate cancer Monday at his Perry Hall home. He was 84. Born in Baltimore, he was a 1939 graduate of Gaithersburg High School. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1943 from what was then Western Maryland College and a master's degree in education in 1952 from the Johns Hopkins University. Before beginning his teaching career, Mr. Ledford was an occupational counselor for the Army and a metallurgist at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant.

Mervin Thompson, a retired city public school guidance counselor active in Northwest Baltimore social organizations, died of cardiac arrest Monday at Union Memorial Hospital. The Ashburton resident was 75. Born in Baltimore and raised on West Mosher Street, he was a 1946 Frederick Douglass High School graduate. He enlisted in the Army and operated radios while stationed in Hawaii, Guam and Japan. He then earned a history degree from what is now Morgan State University and later studied at the Johns Hopkins University, Loyola College, Rutgers University and the University of Delaware.

Wearing just their T-shirts and underwear, Christina Means and her family escaped from a house fire that struck in the middle of the night. They watched the Rosedale house burn in the cold December air and waited for the firetrucks, wrapped in the one blanket Means had grabbed when the smoke detectors had sounded and her boyfriend had shouted that he saw flames out the window. "We were so scared, we just ran out," Means said. "No shoes, no socks. " In the next 48 hours one thing became clear: All their possessions were burned or water-damaged, and a lapsed renters' insurance policy meant they were going to have to start over.

I am not one of Maryland's public high school guidance counselors, and yet at this time of year, I feel their pain. So I shall speak up for them, because they have no voice - or at least I can't hear their desperate, muffled cries from beneath the smothering heap of paperwork they are processing for hundreds of anxious high school students facing the looming college application deadline of Dec. 1. High school guidance counselors have to write...

  Katherine Howard and Andrew Hood   Sam and Melissa Howard, of Chesapeake, Va., announce the engagement of their daughter, Katherine Elizabeth Howard, to Andrew Symmes Hood, son of Carl and Cynthia Hood, of Dayton. The bride-to-be is a 2002 graduate of Robinson Secondary School; a 2006 graduate of Longwood University, in Farmville, Va., where she earned a Bachelor of Science in psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in communications; and a graudate of the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Va., where she earned a master's degree.

A North Carroll Middle School eighth-grader is being charged as a juvenile after he voluntarily surrendered a handgun he brought to the Hampstead school Wednesday, Oct. 26, to a school staff member he went to for help. Maryland State Police identified the student is a 15-year-old male. He is not being identified because he is being charged as a juvenile. According to police accounts, shortly before 11 a.m. Wednesday, the student was in the school lunchroom for his lunch period when he approached an assistant principal in the room and said he was troubled with thoughts of harming himself.

A 15-year-old middle school student was arrested on Wednesday after police said he took a loaded handgun to his school in Hampstead and told an assistant principal that he was "struggling with thoughts of suicide. " The eighth grade student at North Carroll Middle School was charged as a juvenile with gun possession. Maryland State Police said he voluntarily surrendered the semi-automatic .40 caliber handgun, which was in a lunch bag and had three bullets in the magazine. "There is no indication at this time that the student had any desire to harm anyone other than himself," police said in a statement.

Nora Lee Scanlan, a retired Howard County public school guidance counselor and newspaper columnist, died Sept. 22 of breast cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Columbia. She was 71. Born in Seattle and raised in St. Paul, Minn., Ms. Scanlan was a 1958 graduate of Our Lady of Peace High School. She entered the Sisters of Charity that year in Belrose, N.Y., and remained in the order for a decade before leaving in 1968. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1963 from Mundelein College in Chicago, and a master's degree in 1967 from Queens College in Flushing, N.Y. Ms. Scanlan taught at schools in Minnesota and New Jersey before joining Howard County public schools.

Elkridge Elementary School will end this school year with a few final goodbyes to some fine folks that have been touching little lives for many years. Here are snapshots of three people that have made wonderful contributions to the education system and are now retiring, or rather evolving, into another phase of life. Sandy Lee Byerly, para educator. After a few gentle prods, Sandy shares a little bit of herself as she embarks on her new journey. "Elkridge is my real, honest-to-goodness 'hometown.' I grew up here and attended the old Elkridge Elementary School, Waterloo Junior High and Howard High.