New Union

Matt Stover, the Ravens' veteran place-kicker and the team's representative to the NFL Players Association, has urged his fellow reps that longtime executive director Gene Upshaw be replaced. Stover wrote in the e-mail that he was part of a conference call Friday of players representatives who discussed the possible ouster of Upshaw, the head of the NFL players union since 1983, ESPN reported yesterday. "I am not the only rep who listened and felt that it was time for a change," Stover wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained by ESPN.

At a signing ceremony earlier this month, Gov. Martin O'Malley made official the first-ever contract between the state and family child care providers who participate in Maryland's child care subsidy program. I'm among the people who benefit from this agreement - so are the children in my care and their families. I am a family child care provider, a homeowner and a parent. There are days when I start work at 6 a.m.; some nights my last child isn't picked up until 11:30 p.m. This is the nature of family child care.

A thick April shower falls on the fine old building that was the President Street railroad station and on Pratt Street and on Camden Station and on the silent graves of the Civil War dead all across the city. Now the Civil War Museum, the modest brick depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore line nestles uneasily among its towering new neighbors between Little Italy and the Inner Harbor, a handsome antique in a neighborhood of knockoff modernism. The President Street station is 140 years old and a truly historic site.

IN 1997, BOB CHASE, president of the National Education Association, began advocating a "new unionism," challenging members of the world's largest teacher union to "match your traditional advocacy for decent pay and working conditions with a forceful new advocacy for quality schools." Chase's timing was perfect. Education has never been an appropriate theater for industrial collective bargaining, in which both sides glower at each other across the table, the employer gives and the employee takes.

A headline in Wednesday's Evening Sun incorrectly described why members of the Teamsters union were picketing a division of Ryder Systems Inc. They were protesting the company's use of unionized truck drivers who were not members of the Teamsters.In the first nationwide job action by a newly reformed and more-courteous Teamsters union, about 50 unionized drivers protested quietly outside a Ryder System Inc. truck rental store on North Point Boulevard yesterday to call for a nationwide boycott of the Miami-based transportation company.

In her first official act yesterday as president of the Baltimore Teachers Union, Marcia Brown suggested that her staff "chill out" -- go home to cut the anxiety on the day after her surprise election victory.It was the first of many problems Brown is to face during an abrupt transition of power in the city's largest municipal union.Elected officers assume their posts the day after the vote, by BTU rules that had less consequence when the president was unchallenged or re-elected. But Brown is the first new president since 1978 -- and the union is in the middle of contract negotiations with the city.

Today marks the beginning of another school year for students and educators in Carroll County.And with the new year comes a fresh start for youth, as they prepare to begin the next level of their educational experience.It's also a new year for some local teachers who will leave the classroom and report to the front office to serve the school system in a different capacity.One is Barbara Bankard of Westminster.Ms. Bankard, who spent the last seven years as an extended enrichment resource teacher in Carroll County schools, is the new assistant principal at Mount Airy Middle School.

New Windsor and Union Bridge sit as bookends on Carroll County's rural Route 75, separated by four miles and a middle school, a graveyard and a grocery.These are quiet places -- the smallest pair of the county's eight incorporated towns -- but they are slowly stirring.Residents of both towns are feeling their first growing pains since World War II, and many fear the changes could forever alter the face of the remote communities.You see it in the rolling, agricultural landscape of New Windsor as 150 new two-story, aluminum-sided houses dot the hillsides in stark contrast to the town's stately Victorian homes.

A review in last Sunday's Perspective section in The Sun incorrectly identified the reviewer, David Kusnet, as a staff member of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He was on its staff from 1974 through 1984.The Sun regrets the error.For a union movement whose membership strength has dropped from 35 to 16 percent of the workforce over the past 40 years, the Teamsters' victory at UPS suggests that labor is calling a halt to its decline.With new leadership at the AFL-CIO and a commitment by major unions to devote more resources to organizing new members, it seems that labor will not go gently into the good night most media and academic pundits had forecast.

The new union contract Baltimore City teachers are voting on Wednesday and Thursday has the potential to radically change the nature of public education not only for city schoolchildren but for students in school districts across the state. It would immediately thrust Baltimore into the forefront of school reform efforts nationally and provide a model for others to emulate that represents a bold departure from the past. A success of that magnitude here would force neighboring jurisdictions to adopt similar changes or risk a brain drain of talented teachers, who would flock to Baltimore for higher salaries and the chance to really make a difference in young people's lives.