School Attendance

"I'M HERE because I care about you." That's what Circuit Judge David W. Young tells each child he meets during truancy court in West Baltimore Middle School, where he volunteers on Wednesday mornings. He also says he's tired of locking up kids like them when he does his paid job, sitting on the bench in Courthouse East. Last school year, 52 percent of students in the city's middle and high schools were classified truant, which means absent without excuse more than 20 days -- a month's worth of class.

Meeting Tuesday on pathway plan The Howard County Department of Planning and Zoning will hold a public meeting at 6:45 p.m. Tuesday to acquaint residents with a proposed pathway project that is expected to begin construction in the fall of next year. The project involves the installation of an 8-foot-wide pathway for hiking and biking along Broken Land Parkway, from Cradlerock Way to Snowden River Parkway. The pathway, which is being funded through a Transportation Enhancement Grant awarded to the county by the State Highway Administration, is designed to connect office parks, retail buildings and residential neighborhoods, Lake Elkhorn and the County Spinal Pathway, a network of paths that are to extend from Savage to Broken Land Parkway, and through Columbia to Centennial Park.

I applaud the Supreme Court's decision to scrap the "Miranda warning" nonsense ("Supreme Court says suspects must tell police they want to be silent during interrogation," June 1). If it was needed in the past, it is needed no more. With its ubiquitous appearance in several decades worth of TV police and lawyer shows, I'm willing to bet that if a poll were conducted, asking each respondent to complete these two sentences often heard on the TV, "You have the right to remain . . ." and "Oh say, can you see . . .," many more people would be able to complete the first than they would the second, and could go on to explain the rest of the warning.

Nearly 200 parents from South Carroll and Mount Airy attended a redistricting hearing last night, imploring the Carroll County Board of Education to leave their elementary-school-age children in their current schools rather than move them to less-crowded buildings. Many at the meeting at Century High School in Eldersburg spoke about the disruption in transferring children from a school where they have friends and routines to a place where they don't know teachers, guidance counselors, or even cafeteria line workers.

Carroll educators asked the county's legislative delegation to support existing state funding formulas for schools and a variety of reform initiatives, including compulsory school attendance and mandatory kindergarten."

Police give name of toddler hit by car Anne Arundel County police on Wednesday released the name of a Harwood toddler who died in a traffic accident near Lothian this week. The child, Joseph Smith, 16 months, of the 1500 block of Carmody Court, was struck by a car on Tuesday, police said. The child was taken to Children's Hospital in Washington, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The woman driving the car had just dropped off her daughter with Desirae Smith, who runs a day care facility out of her home, police said.

Let's find out if snow time plan workedDo Stalinist central planners like state school Superintendent Nancy Grasmick ever get held accountable?Last year, to teach the gods of weather that ice storms would not deprive children of their school time, she decreed that every minute of that missed time would be made up.At the conclusion of this educational reform, many players in this grand experiment were interviewed. Impressions varied from a good idea to a pointless exercise that burned out students.

It all boils down to one word: "accountability."After years of taxpayer criticism about the quality of education, the state's public schools are being weighed on the scales of performance -- and coming up short.Throughout the state yesterday, local school administrators moved to put the best face on results from the second annual state school "report card."The report, which grew out of a gubernatorial task force on education several years ago, is part of an ambitious, multiyear effort by the state to hold local districts accountable for the quality of education.

With clinics open today at school headquarters and next week around the city, Baltimore health and education officials predict that they can whittle to a few hundred the number of students barred from classes because they lack immunizations."

Come the end of August, thousands of city youngsters will be returning to school. But for many of them, it will feel as if they hardly left. This year, about 22,000 students attended the city's monthlong, half-day summer learning programs. Only a fraction of them came to make up courses they failed. Most were there to take advantage of enrichment courses in reading, math and the arts designed to help them retain skills learned the previous year and give them a leg up on the next. The purpose of summer school has changed since 2003, when the city adopted a policy of social promotion that allowed students to pass no matter how poorly they performed in the classroom.