Kent County

Three workers at a Kent County nursery were injured yesterday after lightning struck near them as they sought shelter from a storm, a farm supervisor said. The day before, an Oxon Hill teenager was struck and killed by lightning while waiting at a bus stop. The 2,000-acre Angelica Nurseries Inc., in rural Kennedyville, employs about 200 Hispanic migrant workers, said supervisor Chris Atkinson. He was called to the scene because he is trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Atkinson said the employees were following procedures by trying to get to a Ford Econoline van because of reports of violent storms in the area.

A 12-year-old girl's account on her MySpace.com page led to her father and stepmother's arrests yesterday on child abuse charges, Maryland State Police said. The girl, who lives in Florida, wrote on the Internet site that the couple had given her cocaine and marijuana several times while she was visiting them over the holidays at their home in Kent County, according to police. State police Sgt. Russell Newell said that when the girl returned home, her mother grew suspicious about what had happened during the visit.

MASSEY -- The Kent County planning board has approved plans for building an asphalt plant in a cornfield on the edge of this town near the Delaware line. Neighbors fear an environmental disaster.The approval came last week after the county commission rewrote the zoning law in July to accommodate David C. Bramble, a prominent Eastern Shore paving contractor.Opponents say a plant at the headwaters of Swantown Creek, a tributary of the Sassafras River, would destroy wetlands and habitat for salamanders, pollute water and affect the flavor of the milk from Lester "Bucky" Jones' cows on an adjacent farm.

Serious crime declined 5 percent in Maryland last year, with decreases reported in four of the state's five regions, according to a report to be released today by Maryland State Police. It was the third straight year that crime has declined statewide."We've made good progress," said Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who has focused on crime prevention and justice issues during her tenure. "Obviously, I'm pleased with the 5 percent drop in violent crime. But we have a way to go. We can't rest easy."

Though we have a commodious guest room in our old farmhouse in Galena, my mother-in-law declined to stay with us when she came for Thanksgiving last year. It wasn't a rift in family relations. It was the commotion. We have dogs and kids, something Jane finds nice in the abstract, but a little overwhelming at the end of a long day. So, when she accepted our invitation for a huge family-and-friends turkey day feast, it was conditional:"I'd love to come if you can make me a reservation at the hotel."

CENTREVILLE -- The next time Queen Anne's and Kent County's high schools meet on a basketball court, the only sounds will be the squeak of shoes on the hardwood floor and referees' whistles.No cheerleaders, no classmates, no spectators. Just two varsity boys' teams in an otherwise empty gym.At the two rural schools, where pickup trucks line student parking lots and Future Farmers of America chapters are among the most popular clubs, a longtime basketball rivalry has been marred by gunfire twice in the past year.

Carroll County school officials are in the same position they were a year ago: trying to explain why their much-touted system slipped a notch in the state's annual assessment of student achievement.Statewide test scores show Carroll ranks fourth among Maryland's 24 school systems, after falling to third last year.Rankings in the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program matter in suburban Carroll, which likes to woo outsiders by bragging about its top-rate classrooms."We're not going to mask it, we're concerned," said Michael Perich, Carroll's supervisor of continuous improvement.

An elderly Kent County man was in critical condition yesterday after contracting salmonella poisoning at a dinner held by a volunteer fire company, health officials said. At least 16 other people were sickened by the bacteria.Authorities would not identify the elderly man but said he was admitted Wednesday to Kent & Queen Anne's Hospital in Chestertown. "He's more critical today than yesterday, and we're very concerned," said Dr. John A. Grant of the Kent County Health Department.The dinner was held as a fund-raiser by Millington Fire Company March 20, one of four such meals the company prepares each year.

And in the seventh year, they hit a wall.Maryland's public school pupils posted slightly lower scores on last spring's statewide exams, their first-ever decline in the tests' seven-year history.Test scores fell in 15 of the state's 24 school systems -- including all five of Baltimore's suburban districts -- but Baltimore City improved on Maryland's annual report card of school progress.Across the state, third- and fifth-grade scores fell slightly, while eighth-graders improved a bit."Am I concerned?

Sending four wrestlers to the final round and coming away with four champions, Kent County had just enough to get past Owings Mills and Calvert to claim South River's 17-team Sonny Wells Seahawk Invitational yesterday in Edgewater.Kent finished the night with 167 points, while Owings Mills, ranked No. 8 in the metro area, had to settle for a share of second place with Calvert at 164."We had a real bad day," said Owings Mills coach Guy Pritzker. "We haven't wrestled in nine days and didn't practice the last two. You have to give Kent credit, they wrestled well.

A year after the state announced a legal settlement requiring cleanup of long-standing pollution problems at a chemical plant near Chestertown on the Eastern Shore, the work remains stalled by disputes with the plant's owner. Genovique Specialties Corp. has balked at demands from the state Department of the Environment that it do more testing of soil and groundwater for toxic and potentially cancer-causing chemicals at its manufacturing facility, which sits beside an unnamed stream that ultimately flows to the Chesapeake Bay. The company, based in Rosemont, Ill., first submitted a plan last August for investigating contamination at its Kent County plant, which manufactures "plasticizers" - substances that make plastics flexible.

State gets $44 million for affordable housing Maryland will get more than $44 million in federal funds to spur development of affordable housing projects throughout the state that have been stalled because of the economic downturn, the U.S. Treasury Department announced today. Maryland is one of 12 states or territories selected to receive a total of $486 million this week in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. The federal grants will be awarded to Maryland's Department of Housing and Community Development, which in turn will "subaward" the money as cash grants to help develop or preserve affordable rental projects that meet federal requirements for funding assistance.

More than half of the members of the Maryland State Board of Education will be new to the panel this summer, a result of an unusually high number of resignations combined with the staggered turnover of positions. Seven of the 12 board members have left in the past several months, including Blair Ewing, a well-respected education leader from Montgomery County who died Monday, and Rosa Garcia, who recently took a new job working for a member of Congress and said she would not have time to continue on the board.

CRUMPTON - - A man who initially said his wife was fatally stabbed by a carjacker who forced them to drive to the Eastern Shore has been charged in her killing, Maryland State Police said. Ryan D. Holness, 28, of the 4800 block of Spinnaker Court in Lexington Park, has been charged with first- and second-degree murder in the death of his wife, Serika Dunkley Holness, 26, of the same address, said state police spokesman Greg Shipley. State police said information provided by Holness throughout the day did not match that provided by witnesses and evidence found at the scene.

Howard Arthur "Hound Dog" Brown, an Eastern Shore huntsman who bred foxhounds, was a fox hunter until his late 80s, when he switched from a horse to a pickup truck to continue his pursuit of the elusive prey. Mr. Brown, who was 96, died in his sleep April 22 at Chestertown Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. Mr. Brown was born in Baltimore and was raised in Reisterstown and Westminster. He attended Carroll County public schools until dropping out in the eighth grade. "He then began working with horses.

Two years ago, the Chester River Association discovered that a small Eastern Shore chemical plant was dumping phosphorus and other pollutants into a Kent County creek. Workers and volunteers from the watchdog group took numerous samples, had them analyzed and provided the evidence to state officials, who brought legal action against the plant's owners. But the association's participation in the lawsuit was short-lived. A Kent County Circuit Court judge ruled last year that the group lacked legal standing and threw them out. Under Maryland case law, the plaintiff generally needs to be a neighbor within "sight or sound" range to be considered an aggrieved party.

At a former Civil War-era schoolhouse in middle-of-nowhere Kent County, a glitzy international trade show was taking shape. An icy rain fell on the darkened fields of little Locust Grove as Joe Karlik sat designing a set in 3D for a springtime event that his client, MTV, plans for that sunny coastal paradise, the French Riviera. "There it is," Karlik said. He referred to the outline of a virtual 105-inch plasma television he was dragging electronically onto the mockup emerging on his computer screen.

H. Norman Grieb II, a retired Chestertown Realtor, died Wednesday of complications from Parkinson's disease at Chester River Medical Center. He was 89. Mr. Grieb was born in Eagles Mere, Pa., and raised in St. Davids, Pa. He was a 1936 graduate of William Penn Charter School and attended the University of Virginia. He served in the Coast Guard and Army before being honorably discharged in 1943. Mr. Grieb worked in sales for the Baldwin Electrical Co. and then established Farm Service Co., an electrical and plumbing contracting firm.

Let's go to the mailbox, shall we, folks? Over the past seven days, readers have provided more to chew on than a loaf of 100 percent fiber bread with a Metamucil chaser - shaken, not stirred. Here's a sampling. Full docket After last week's column that highlighted poaching on the Eastern Shore and urged readers to write to the prosecutors handling the cases - Talbot County's Scott Patterson and Kent County's Robert Strong Jr. - Hugh Delaney posed this: "It's a shame that so many people take time and tons of money trying to keep the bay one-tenth sustainable but these jerks get a mere fine.

MASSEY -- Sean Jones surveys the lush green expanse of ripening winter wheat that his dairy herd will be munching all year. Fourteen hundred acres - looking in any direction, it's pretty much all you can see. This uninterrupted vista is what convinced the Jones clan (including Sean's parents, two brothers and their families) to pull up stakes in 1995, swapping their farm near Mount Holly, N.J., to come here to Kent County, one of the remaining spots on the East Coast where farming endures as the cornerstone of a rural way of life.