School Graduation

Carroll County public schools have announced graduation and certificate ceremonies for the 2006-2007 year. They are: Friday 10 a.m.: Post-Secondary program, Carroll Community college auditorium. Thursday, May 31 7 p.m.: Carroll County Career and Technology Center Certificate Ceremony, Westminster High School. Friday, June 1 7 p.m.: South Carroll High School Career and Technology Center Certificate Program, SCHS. Monday, June 4 7 p.m.: Carroll Springs School Certificate Program, Carroll Springs.

Brenna Doherty's dream of becoming a world-class figure skater has had its share of bumpy landings. They began when Doherty was a freshman at Oakland Mills High in Columbia. After making the finals at junior nationals at ages 13 and 14, Doherty thought she wanted to try being a typical teenager. "When I first entered high school, I wanted to be a part of the Homecoming committee, and all kinds of stuff like that," Doherty, now 18, recalled recently. "I followed my friends and joined some of their clubs, but I definitely decided it wasn't for me. I wanted to go to the ice rink every day and train.

Area schools and literacy programs seek volunteers to help children and adults improve reading skills. Among them: Huntingdon Baptist Church, 400 E. 31st St., which needs tutors from high school age to adult to help elementary pupils with reading and math from 10 a.m. to noon Saturdays in its Save A Youth program. Tutoring can help fulfill community service requirements for high school graduation. Contact: Mayess Craig, 410-466-4731.

It is graduation season, and parents and other significant grown-ups are stumped for a gift for the high school or college senior. I was going to offer a list of suggestions that had always worked for me, but apparently I was kidding myself. If survey data are to be believed, my children and their friends have ridiculed every one of my graduation gifts. And here I thought Anne Morrow Lindbergh's A Gift From the Sea was the perfect book to help a girl bridge the gap into womanhood. Wow, was I wrong.

They came home yesterday to their alma mater - Lake Clifton-Eastern High School - to look through old photographs, share stories and exchange addresses and hugs. Some are in college now. One is a sixth-grade teacher at a Baltimore middle school. Another is a shoe salesman. All are alumni of the Educational Opportunity Program, an effort launched at Lake Clifton 14 years ago that has helped hundreds of city kids through high school, into college and on to what one of them called the "real world" beyond.

The latest statistics from the Maryland State Department of Education show Baltimore City making steady progress toward increasing the number of students who finish high school. Last year city schools awarded 149 more diplomas than in 2011, and the city's 3.3 percentage point decline in dropouts was the largest in the region. That's great news for all the teachers, principals and school staff who have worked so hard to get the city's schools back on track. Since his arrival in Baltimore six years ago, schools CEO Andrés Alonso has made boosting high school graduation rates a priority of his reform effort, and during that period the schools' dropout rate has declined by more than half.

A state Board of Education mandate has given preliminary approval to a new program that would make Maryland the first state in the nation to require a form of community service as a condition of high school graduation. It is part of a broad revision of the state's graduation standards aimed at making high school rTC study more rigorous.The Evening Sun would like to know whether you think the graduation standards should be widened to include community service.To register your opinion, call SUNDIAL at 783-1800 (or 268-7736 in Anne Arundel County)

The state Board of Education has taken an innovative step by making community service work a requirement for high school graduation beginning in the 1993-94 school year.The new mandate is a long-needed recognition on the part of the state that a good education is far more than mastery of written and verbal skills and mathematical formulas -- that it also involves learning basic values like compassion, decency and involvement. Certainly there is no surer way to teach young people such abstract principles than to give them a chance to work with the poor and the sick or to experience, firsthand, a piece of their community's cultural or political life.

Even as relatives and friends held a funeral Monday to mourn a young mother killed by a stray bullet, Baltimore police pushed to solve a spate of killings that has left 10 dead in the past 10 days. Dozens of mourners passed the open casket of LaRelle Ashlyn Amos, the former high school honor student who was killed after a family party in the early morning hours of Sept. 2. Geron Mills, the man Amos had called "the love of my life," placed his hand on his own chest, then on hers. "I took my heart out and put it in there with her," Mills, the father of Amos' 1-year-old son, Geron II, said as he addressed more than 700 people at St. Stephens AME Church in Essex.

In Anthony Deliberti's office at Richard Montgomery High School, a black ribbon is taped to the wall next to a newspaper clipping. The headline: "Board Rejects Student Community Service."The board in this case is the Montgomery County school board, one of a score of groups that has come out against the state proposal to make community service a high school graduation ** requirement in Maryland.The ribbon is for mourning. With all due respect to his bosses, Mr. Deliberti, the county's community service coordinator, thinks they made the wrong choice.