Park Middle School

About 30 students clacked away their waning minutes of class time in Harlem Park Middle School's darkened computer lab, their faces illuminated by the colorful computer games' graphics.Though the students were hard at play, lab manager Deborah Hardy assured guests that the students' 15 minutes of free time was a reward for finishing 30 minutes of algebra.The reward system is a hallmark at Harlem Park, where 98 of 1,212 students have achieved perfect attendance so far this school year, about 70 more than last year.

When state schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick called on Maryland students to pitch in after the devastating earthquake in Haiti this year, they responded. But none quite like the seventh-graders at Severna Park Middle School. The Anne Arundel students were celebrated Thursday afternoon for raising $12,000 for relief efforts in Haiti — the most of any school in Maryland — in the statewide Maryland Kids Care Campaign, Operation Haiti: Collecting Pennies (and More)

Alfred Dale Proffitt, a retired city educator who had been vice principal of Roland Park Middle School and whose career spanned more than three decades, died of pulmonary failure Saturday at York Hospital in York, Pa. The former longtime Northeast Baltimore resident was 76. Mr. Proffitt, the son of a Southern Railway carpenter, was born in Monroe, Va., the youngest of five brothers and a sister. "His father named him for Alf Landon but his mother didn't like that name and added the Dale," said his wife of 54 years, the former Theresa M. Wozniak, a retired educator.

The rumors are true. Lindale-Brooklyn Park Middle School's assistant principal, Bill Eggert, is a biker.OK, it's not a Harley motorcycle, but a 10-speed bike that is Eggert's favorite mode of transportation. To share his enthusiasm for the sport with his students, he recently began a bike club at Lindale-Brooklyn.The bike club's 15 members learn about bike repair, safety and maintenance. Members are setting up a workshop at the school.An avid cyclist, Eggert started his first bike club while teaching at Southern High School.

Science teacher George Wright was trying to find a way to make the formation and evolution of a star come alive for his students at Lindale/Brooklyn Park Middle School and wound up charting his way into the pages of a national science catalog.His star cycle chart, which depicts the eight stages of a star from birth to death, appears on Page 5 of the 1996 Science Kit & Boreal Laboratories catalog, released in February by the Tonawanda, N.Y., company.A photograph of Wright is included in the 1,050-page catalog, which he received Tuesday.

City police chasing a suspected car thief on foot forced a lock-down at Roland Park Elementary/Middle School in the city's northwest neighborhood for less than an hour Monday morning. The city dispatch notified area schools of the incident, which began about 8:10 a.m. Police chased the suspect, who abandoned the stolen car and ran across a field at the school in the 5200 hundred block of Roland Avenue. Staff heard police calling "Stop" and saw the suspect continue running, officials said.

In Roland Park, home to one of Baltimore's highest-performing public schools, dozens of parents are at odds with administrators over an academic perk: recess for middle-schoolers. In a dispute that mirrors the nationwide debate over students' participation in physical activity, the parents want sixth- through eighth-grade students to have some relief from Roland Park Elementary/Middle School's rigorous academic regimen of 70-minute classes and restricted social time. They say it's an essential part of their children's education.

Poet Alan Britt asks 20 third-graders at Roland Park Elementary/Middle School to feel the Spanish guitar music of Ottmar Liebert spilling from a small stereo, so they can describe it using their five senses and figures of speech.As the first song, "Barcelona Nights," begins, the childrenexpress their feelings by dancing, clapping and moving to the beat. Britt smiles as a conga line forms, the students parading between groups of desks while their teacher, Marion Quickley Johnson, claps in time.

Go purple, or go to the library. That was the warning some teachers issued to parents at Roland Park Elementary/Middle School regarding student participation at Friday's Ravens-sponsored pep rally in advance of the team's conference championship game Sunday against the New England Patriots. "Students must wear purple or Ravens attire to attend, as there will be many TV cameras there," one teacher wrote to parents in an email obtained by The Baltimore Sun. "Not wearing purple or Ravens attire means making a choice not to attend.

The ceremony, one parent remarked, was like an eighth-grade kiss: awkward but sweet, and by the end, more than a little wet.Morrell Park Elementary-Middle School graduated its first class of eighth-graders yesterday during a carefully scripted two-hour program that took more than a year to plan and about $2,000 to put together.Plants, flowers and politicians filled the sweltering school gymnasium, balloons covered the worn basketball backboards, and the 62 graduates took turns reciting poetry, mouthing the words to Mariah Carey songs, and giving speeches even as they sweated through their caps and gowns (blue for the boys, yellow for the girls)