Maintenance Workers

Maintenance workers in Anne Arundel County schools won't get a pay raise but will keep their top-of-the-line health insurance program under a contract proposal ratified by the school board this week.Local 1693 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) became the first of three school employee unions to settle with the board on a contract. The board ratified the contract at its meeting Wednesday; a formal union vote will be conducted at the union's next meeting.

A boiler room explosion at Bates Middle School in Annapolis on Wednesday morning injured two maintenance workers and prompted Anne Arundel County School officials to evacuate the building. Anne Arundel County Schools spokesman Bob Mosier said that the school's boiler was down and a maintenance crew was working on it shortly before 9 a.m., when a small explosion occurred in the boiler room. Mosier said there was no fire but significant smoke from the explosion. The maintenance workers were transported to a nearby hospital with minor injuries.

Stalled contract negotiations between Amtrak and its rail maintenance workers is threatening to shut down much of the nation's passenger trains and strand thousands of commuters shortly after the Labor Day holiday.The Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees says it intends to strike the nation's passenger rail system Sept. 4 -- the end of a 30-day cooling-off period.The union rejected an arbitration offer from the National Mediation Board last week and has launched a letter campaign, urging President Clinton not to intervene.

Baltimore police were searching for a man who tried to rob a guest at a downtown hotel after gaining entry into her room by posing as a maintenance worker. The attempted robbery occurred about 9:30 a.m. Wednesday at the Marriott Inner Harbor at Camden Yards hotel in the 100 block of S. Eutaw St., said Anthony Guglielmi, the department's chief spokesman. A woman was sleeping in her room when a man dressed in an outfit resembling a maintenance uniform knocked on the door and said he was there to fix a problem, according to Guglielmi.

A boiler room explosion at Bates Middle School in Annapolis on Wednesday morning injured two maintenance workers and prompted Anne Arundel County School officials to evacuate the building. Anne Arundel County Schools spokesman Bob Mosier said that the school's boiler was down and a maintenance crew was working on it shortly before 9 a.m., when a small explosion occurred in the boiler room. Mosier said there was no fire but significant smoke from the explosion. The maintenance workers were transported to a nearby hospital with minor injuries.

Howard County school administrators and indoor air-quality consultants will answer questions tomorrow from Howard High School parents, students and the community about a mildew odor and the discovery of asbestos in the school.Asbestos floor tiles were discovered recently in a first-floor classroom by maintenance workers, who were removing the carpet in an attempt to get rid of a mildew odor.The asbestos tiles were removed without any health hazard to students or staff, school officials said.

Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III's unilateral decision to cancel "heat days" is sure to cause much grumbling among the 430 Housing Authority maintenance workers who no longer can quit -- with pay -- every time the temperature reaches 90 degrees by noon and humidity registers at least 55 percent.Let them grumble.If there is any scandal in Mr. Henson's decision, it is in the fact that this extraordinary featherbedding clause was allowed to exist for 30 years without any whistle blower making a big stink about it earlier.

About 300 police officers, social workers and maintenance workers swept into the city's Hollander Ridge public housing high-rise today on a mission to rid the building of its crime and upkeep woes.The sweep is the 17th installment of the city Housing Authority's Operation ECHO, or "extraordinary comprehensive housekeeping operation," an aggressive effort that began last June to rid public housing developments of grime and crime.A low-rise complex of 522 units near the high-rise was not included.

The chief of Baltimore's Housing Authority yesterday scrapped the policy of granting maintenance workers "heat leave," saying they can't be given time off when there is a backlog of 30,000 requests for repairs in public housing.Daniel P. Henson III, the authority's executive director, indefinitely suspended a provision in the workers' contract that gives them the rest of the day off if the temperature reaches 90 degrees or higher with 55 percent humidity by noon.He cited a clause in the contract that allows the authority to keep its 430 maintenance workers on in emergency situations.

Police have arrested two Baltimore men in connection with a spate of burglaries of top-floor apartments in an Ellicott City complex, police said yesterday.During the last month, burglars pried open access panels in apartment building hallways, then crawled over the apartments before punching their way through ceilings. Five apartments were burglarized at the Town & Country Greensview/West on Town and Country Boulevard, police said.Charged with several counts of first-degree burglary and destruction of property were Gary Pernell Byrd, 33, and Carl Daniel Forte, 32. Byrd was being held without bail, and Forte was held on $100,000 bail at the Howard County Detention Center.

George Harold Shanklin, a retired box company maintenance worker and former Perry Hall resident, died of a heart attack July 7 at a hospital in Leominster, Mass. He was 78. Mr. Shanklin was born and raised in Fork and graduated from Towson High School in 1949. He worked for F.X. Hooper Co. Inc. in Glen Arm, manufacturer of corrugated box machinery, until enlisting in the Army in 1952. He returned to the company in 1954, which by that time had been purchased by the Koppers Co. Mr. Shanklin later moved to Lunenburg, Mass.

George L. Kepler Sr., a retired maintenance worker and former longtime Cockeysville resident, died of complications from a stroke April 15 at York Hospital in York, Pa. He was 82. Mr. Kepler was born in Lock Haven, Pa., and was raised in Renovo, Pa. He moved to Baltimore in 1941, and left school after the 10th grade to become an apprentice machinist at Black & Decker Corp. in Towson. He enlisted in the Army during World War II and was given a medical discharge after being injured during basic training.

More than 100 eighth-graders at Patuxent Valley Middle School stared eagerly as they watched the smoky trail left by a model rocket as it ascended hundreds of feet into the sky and then headed back to earth. "Ooh! ... Ahh!" the students exclaimed as a small yellow-and-black marker trailed the rocket on its decent. The students spent three hours Monday launching model rockets that they designed in science class. Launch day was the culmination of weeks of lessons that included Newton's laws of gravity and forces.

James Richard "Rick" DeMarco, a retired maintenance worker, died of respiratory failure Saturday at Good Samaritan Hospital. The Rosedale resident was 59. Mr. DeMarco was born in Baltimore and raised in Highlandtown. He was a 1968 graduate of Patterson High School and served in the Navy as an armorer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal from 1969 to 1970. Mr. DeMarco worked as a cook and a senior citizen center maintenance worker. In 1991, the former Essex resident was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Grace W. Bailey, a homemaker who had been a maintenance worker and a bookbinder, died Monday of heart failure at Sinai Hospital. She was 81. Grace Williams was born and raised in Baltimore. She attended Douglass High School. Mrs. Bailey worked as a maintenance worker in city public schools during the 1950s and 1960s before taking a job at the Enoch Pratt Free Library as a bookbinder. In the early 1970s, she was a teaching assistant at what is now Coppin State University. In 1955, Mrs. Bailey became a Jehovah's Witness.

City police are searching for a man who raped an 88-year-old cancer patient in her Southeast Baltimore home about 9:30 a.m. yesterday. Police said a man posing as a maintenance worker came to the woman's door in the 1300 block of Bethlehem Ave. near the Baltimore County line. The woman let him into her house, and then the man forced her to have sex with him, police said. After the attack, the man demanded money, police said, and she gave him $6. He left through the back of the house.

At a meeting with maintenance workers yesterday, Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke pledged to improve safety in the public housing projects and to provide the workers with more supplies and better training.The mayor also told the meeting of several hundred workers at the War Memorial Building downtown that the city's Housing Authority is trying to come up with a performance-based incentive system."We don't want to pay people dragging their feet the same as people busting their butt," Mr. Schmoke said.

Workers trying to remove a mildew odor from an area of Howard High School inadvertently uncovered asbestos floor tiles in a classroom last week, forcing the room to be closed temporarily while the asbestos was removed, a school system spokeswoman said yesterday.Neither the school's staff nor students were in any danger from either the mildew odor or the asbestos tiles, said spokeswoman Patti Caplan.The area has been inspected by maintenance workers, the Howard County Health Department and an indoor air-quality consultant hired by the school system.

Mamie E. Perry, a retired maintenance worker and longtime Cherry Hill resident, died in her sleep Monday at Crofton Convalescent Center. She was 91. Mamie E. Green, one of 12 children, was born and raised in Mollusk, Va. She moved to Baltimore in the early 1940s, when she took a job as a housekeeper. Mrs. Perry later worked for more than a decade as a maintenance worker for the General Services Administration at Fort Meade. She retired in the early 1970s. She was married for 43 years to Bernard Perry, a truck driver, who died in 1984.

Josephine Jordan, a retired Social Security Administration maintenance worker, died of cancer Dec. 8 at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. The East Baltimore resident was 74. She was born Josephine Williams and raised in Durham, N.C., where she graduated from public schools. She worked in Norfolk, Va., before moving to Baltimore in 1948. She had held positions at Johns Hopkins Hospital and at a nursing home before taking a job with the Social Security Administration in Woodlawn in the early 1980s.