Open Enrollment

The Howard County Board of Education is expected to vote on guidelines tonight that would firmly close the door on open enrollment in the county's public schools in all but a handful of specific circumstances. The board voted at its March 20 meeting to extend a moratorium on open enrollment implemented last year that ended the county's policy of open enrollment in its public schools. Before the moratorium, parents could effectively hand-pick their children's schools as long as they could provide transportation to schools outside their districts and if they chose schools that were below capacity.

After 27 years in the Howard County school system - the last 16 in what might be called the district's toughest position - Associate Superintendent Maurice F. Kalin will retire at the end of the school year. Kalin, 60, announced Friday his intention to retire. Kalin said yesterday that he was unprepared to talk in-depth about his reasons for leaving or what his future plans may be, but said he would go into more detail later in the week. Although he has held several jobs since joining the school system in 1974, Kalin has perhaps become best known as the "redistricting czar" - in charge of drawing district boundaries, sending neighborhoods of children to new or different schools and making hundreds of families angry every year.

Medical marijuana views cross lines of politics, ideology The medical use of marijuana is one of the areas that highlights personal and pragmatic differences, rather than political and ideological ones, among the 11 members of Howard County's legislative delegation. Conservative Republican Dels. Robert H. Kittleman and Donald E. Murphy say people dying of cancer should be able to use marijuana, if that helps, without worrying about being arrested. So do liberal Democrats Shane Pendergrass and Frank S. Turner.

Giving itself more time to study the popular but much debated policy, the Howard County Board of Education voted last night to continue for one year its moratorium on open enrollment. "When we voted to have the moratorium, I knew one year would not be sufficient to gather any kind of data you need to come to any real conclusions," board member Sandra H. French said. The 20-year open enrollment policy allows parents to send their children to any school with empty seats so long as they provide their own transportation.

To folks like Chris Thorne, the decision that parents make about where to send their children to school in Howard County is as simple as elementary arithmetic. "They only have one shot at going through school," said Thorne, who lives in Columbia. "Just one. So sometimes you just have to do what you have to do." To folks like North Laurel's Lisa Kawata, Thorne and others like him embody a subtle, surreptitious form of classism creeping through the school system. To the Howard County school board, it has come down to this: Now that it is time to decide what to do with the popular but much-debated policy called open enrollment, whose standpoint is the more valid?

Should Howard County parents have the right to send their children to any school in the county that has room for them? To that question, there are many answers - and the Board of Education heard nearly all of them last night at a public hearing on the contentious issue of open enrollment. The board is reconsidering the policy, which allows parents to send their children to under-enrolled schools as long as they provide transportation. Last year, the board placed a one-year moratorium on the popular practice to study its pros and cons.

AT LAST week's "Coffee with the Principal" program at River Hill High School, parents spoke with Principal Scott Pfeifer in a casual, relaxed atmosphere. The eight parents who attended spoke candidly about issues that affected their children. Assistant Principal David Brown sat in on the discussion. "The boys indoor track team won the state championship for the second year in a row," said Cindy Prucha of Highland. Why, she wanted to know, was the information not on a sign outside the school?

Board of Education to hold public hearing on open enrollment The Howard County Board of Education will hold a public hearing at 7:30 p.m. March 8 on open enrollment options under consideration for the 2001-2002 school year: to continue the current moratorium on open enrollment for a second year, to repeal the open-enrollment policy or to continue to allow open enrollment in schools where space is available. The hearing will be held in the boardroom at the Department of Education, 10910 Route 108, Ellicott City.