Reading Specialists

Lauretta Delores Johnson Gilmore, a retired reading specialist in Baltimore public schools who wrote poetry and songs, died April 25 of cancer at St. Agnes Hospital. She was 67 and lived on West Saratoga Street.Known as Tessa, she retired in 1981 after 30 years with the school system. She continued teaching in the adult basic education program sponsored by the Community College of Baltimore until 1991, when failing health forced a second retirement."She chose teaching as her profession because of her love and concern for children, especially the underprivileged," said her cousin, Dorothy Williams of Baltimore.

Celebrity performances will launch business-sponsored reading programs at two city elementary schools this week.Actor James Earl Jones, recognized locally as the voice of Bell Atlantic commercials, will make the morning announcements and read Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" tomorrow at City Springs Elementary.Company employee-volunteers will read books to students there each day this school year.On Tuesday, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke and Crestar Bank's Maryland region president, Scott Wilfong, will be in the cast of a play adaptation of Pete Seeger's children's book, "Abiyoyo," at Gwynns Falls Elementary.

Archbishop Spalding High School, where students wear the traditional uniform, is proud that it can also break with tradition."We're anything but boring," said Kathleen E. Hider, director of development for the school. "There is a certain stereotype people have of Catholic schools. We do have an underlying value system we work from, but if that's boring, we don't mind."The U.S. Department of Education certainly agrees there's something extraordinary about the school. A week ago, Archbishop Spalding was designated a "Blue Ribbon" school -- a national honor commending "break-the-mold" schools for their innovative approaches to education.

Baltimore County schools are adopting a new screening system to determine which of its seventh- and eighth-grade pupils need additional reading instruction. Under the new system, outlined at a school board meeting last night, all 26 middle schools in the county will use the same standards to assess pupils' reading levels. School officials are evaluating the reading skills of the current sixth-graders, who will be the first class affected. All Baltimore County pupils receive reading instruction through sixth grade.

The creation of an alternative high school for disruptive Anne Arundel teen-agers is virtually assured, as members of the County Council effusively praised it during a workshop yesterday on the school system's $435.8 million operating budget request for the coming fiscal year.Get-tough policies in the past two years have resulted in increased student suspensions and expulsions for school violence and other disruptive behaviors, including 575 expulsions through mid-April of this school year.

Jeanne S. Chall,78, an expert in reading research and instruction who taught at Harvard University, died Saturday in Cambridge, Mass.She was among the first to describe learning to read as a developmental process, and advocated the use of phonics and exposure to challenging literature as the best method to help children read.Ms. Chall helped create several diagnostic tools for reading specialists, including the Dale-Chall Readability Formula, which measures the difficulty a text presents to a student.

Areport released last week has reinforced that the reading improvement program that has been part of the federal No Child Left Behind law has been awash in cronyism and conflicts of interest. The report, prepared by staff members for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, attests to the level of congressional interest in the problems with the program - and underscores the need for changes in the law as soon as possible. In addition, the Department of Education needs to be able to show Congress and the public that its procedures are transparent and above board.

With little wiggle room in the coming year's $424.5 million budget, Anne Arundel school officials say parents can expect larger classes and more classes in which two grades are combined.With the next fiscal year only two weeks away, officials are looking into such things as decreasing the number of high school teachers in favor of adding elementary teachers and how quickly they could hire the 10 new classroom teachers whose jobs are in a contingency account dependent on student enrollment.

Nearly 250 new jobs, most of them teachers, counselors or school administrators, would be added to the Anne Arundel School system under a $452.9 million budget proposed last night by Superintendent Carol S. Parham.Her spending plan is 6.7 percent higher than the current budget of $424.5 million, but it doesn't include pay raises, which would push the increase even higher.Parham endorses raises, the subject of contract talks between the appointed school board and the unions representing school employees, who have not had across-the-board pay increases in two years.

This is to announce, with considerable honor and respect for the occasion, that Betty Mandell has learned how to read.She is 82 years old.And she's making the announcement seven years late.Sometimes it takes a little while to overcome a lifetime of embarrassment - even if it's an embarrassment she shouldn't feel.She couldn't read because she's dyslexic, a disorder diagnosed by no one in 1920s Baltimore schools, nor in the medical community when Betty Mandell was growing up and trying to hide her secret from everyone around her.It was a time when dyslexia didn't yet have a name, a time when no one knew it was a genetic disorder completely unrelated to intelligence, a time when children were pushed aside as simply being too dim to learn how to read and many found themselves consigned to second-class lives.