School In Baltimore

Sister Mary Germana Strassberger, a retired Mercy High School librarian, died of coronary artery disease Wednesday at her order's retirement home in Pinehurst in Baltimore County. She was 96. Born Helen Adelia Strassberger in Baltimore, she attended the old St. John's Academy and was a 1929 Seton High School graduate. She entered the Sisters of Mercy in 1931 and took the name Mary Germana. She received her bachelor's degree in education at the old Mount St. Agnes College and a master's degree in library science at Villanova University in 1971.

Rachel Bowie Arnot, a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel D. Arnot, Jr. of Baltimore, MD and Jason Mahan Rockwell, a son of Mr. and Mrs. David C. Rockwell of Monkton, MD, were married at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church of Owings Mills, MD on June 9 with the Reverend William P. Baxter, Jr. officiating. A reception was held at the Maryland Club. The couple plans to honeymoon in the British Virgin Islands. The bride, 28, is a second grade teacher at Calvert School in Baltimore. She graduated from Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and Middlebury College.

Delma Gordon, a retired social worker who wrote the words to the Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School song, died Tuesday of a pulmonary ailment at Northwest Hospital Center. She was 76 and lived on Ellamont Street.As a member of Dunbar's first graduating class in 1940, she wrote words to the song that was sung by the students who received their diplomas at the school's original location in East Baltimore. The song is still sung at school functions.In the days of racial segregation, Dunbar was the city's second all-black high school, attended by students who lived in East Baltimore.

Sixth-grader Elizabeth Heinrich was late to her first day of classes at Golden Ring Middle School in Baltimore County yesterday, but it wasn't her fault. Really."The bus driver looked right at us but he didn't stop," said Elizabeth, 12, trying to explain her tardiness to lobby monitor Phyllis J. Unrue on a day when she and hundreds of thousands of other Baltimore-area students were starting the academic year.Unrue -- who says she's sympathetic to first-day jitters -- soothed the girl's nerves with reassurances instead of detention.

Once they saw Nathan Bellman play basketball, they promised him the world.Free tuition. Free transportation to school. A free ride on his grades. Thechance to star for a Maryland basketball power.All this for a gangly eighth-grader at Holabird Middle School in BaltimoreCounty.Since last summer, the 14-year-old Dundalk youth has been the target of afierce recruiting effort on behalf of Dunbar High School, albeit not by officialrepresentatives of the Baltimore city school. While it's just one of manybehind-the-scenes recruiting campaigns that go on every year, the aggressiveeffort has caused Nathan and his mother no small anguish.

Harry Howard Ford, 75, Western Electric supervisorHarry Howard Ford, a retired Western Electric Co. supervisor, died Wednesday of cancer at Northwest Hospital Center. He was 75 and lived in Forest Park.Employed at Western Electric from 1946 to 1982, he retired as a safety-engineer supervisor and received perfect attendance awards on numerous occasions.Born in Blackstone, Va., Mr. Ford came to Baltimore as a child and was a graduate of Carver Vocational Technical High School. He attended the Community College of Baltimore.

THE CURTAIN fell on the musical production "Swing Kids" at North Carroll High School before it was ever raised. Blame Mickey Mouse. Student thespians, dancers and musicians are crestfallen, and so are their families.The play was adapted from a 1993 Walt Disney Co. film about German teen-agers who rebelled against the Nazi regime by devotion to American-British jitterbug music. But Disney this month denied permission for the school to use the name or characters of the film. It suggested changes, but the school play director said there was not enough time.

Charles Edward "Eddie" Jones, a noted Baltimore real estate and business lawyer and retired partner in the law firm of Gallagher, Evelius & Jones, died of cancer Friday at Stella Maris Nursing Care Center in Timonium. He was 90.During a career that spanned seven decades, he provided counsel to four Baltimore archbishops and many Baltimore business leaders, including homebuilder Henry J. Knott Sr.He also supported a wide range of archdiocesan causes, including funding for the portraits of Archbishop William D. Borders and Cardinal William H. Keeler that hang in the cardinal's residence in Baltimore and refurbishing a Vatican apartment suite in memory of Cardinal Lawrence Shehan.

SOME PEOPLE have a quaint notion that testing isn't everything schools are about.One of a school's primary missions, this thinking goes, is to build character in students. Virtue, character and their first cousin, patriotism, aren't widely discussed in education these days except during the weeks after a Littleton shooting or a run of arsons in Anne Arundel County.So it's comforting to know that there's a Maryland Center for Character Education and that tomorrow the center will honor this year's "character education schools of the year."

High school pep rallies aren't what they used to be. Gone are the days when an entire student body could crowd into a gymnasium to build school spirit and not risk a melee.Hoping to avoid campus violence -- such as the vicious fight between two girls after the recent homecoming pep rally at Milford Mill Academy in Baltimore County -- even the most optimistic school officials are taking precautions.In Baltimore County, one principal bans pep rallies, and another requires some students to watch them on closed-circuit television.

President Barack Obama urged schoolchildren Tuesday to rise above their mistakes and challenges to succeed in school, offering himself as an example of "a goof-off" who went on to make good. But those words were lost to scores of children in the region who only saw the president's face and heard a few halting words at a time. Technological glitches that may have included problems with C-SPAN and the Internet servers used by some school systems apparently prevented schools from signing on to sites that carried the speech live.

Towson Catholic High School was not the first parochial school in Baltimore to close, and given declining enrollments and a tough economy, it most certainly won't be the last. But it would be hard to imagine a school doing a worse job of handling such a difficult situation. The abrupt announcement, coming less than two months before school is due to resume, left students and faculty alike scrambling to find placements for the fall. The school's leadership made no attempt to reach out to alumni for help before the closure, and it has made no effort since to explain itself to the justifiably angered community.

A therapist who worked at Booker T. Washington Middle School in Baltimore was arrested in Catonsville and charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy, Baltimore County police said yesterday. Robert J. Stoever, 54, of the 1500 block of Park Ave. was arrested Sunday night after a county police officer saw him and the boy in a car in a parking lot at Edmondson Avenue and Academy Road, said Cpl. Michael Hill, a police spokesman. Stoever was charged with a second-degree sex offense and perverted practice, according to court documents.

State schools Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick announced yesterday that her alma mater, Western High School in Baltimore, is among six Maryland Blue Ribbon Schools this year. Also named were Seventh District Elementary in Baltimore County, Southern High in Anne Arundel County, Hammond Middle in Howard County, Highland Elementary in Montgomery County and Stephen Decatur Middle in Worcester County. The schools were selected based on high achievement, significant improvement or both. They will represent Maryland in the national Blue Ribbon Schools competition.

The students at Quarterfield Elementary School know him as Mr. Lee, the custodian who keeps their school in tip-top shape. But his kindness to them - say, buying a lactose-intolerant student without any money a juice drink when all her free lunch would afford her was milk - and his gentle nudging to pick up their trash or pay attention to their teachers is how Cain Lee has won them over. When he walks down the hall, carrying a box of equipment or pushing a broom, the students shout his name.

Five students were arrested and charged yesterday with attacking two teachers at Forest Park High School in Baltimore, school system officials and school sources said. The attack was apparent retaliation against one of the teachers, who said he was the victim of an unarmed robbery by two other students at the school Monday and reported the incident. City police came to the school yesterday to arrest those two students. Then, at about 10:40 a.m., the brother of one of the robbery suspects attacked the teacher, and other students joined in, school sources said.

A grainy, out-of-focus picture from a surveillance camera was about all Baltimore County police had to go on yesterday as they searched for a killer who, without warning, slashed the throat of a 24-year-old woman as she stood in line in a Catonsville liquor store. Saturday's attack on Aysha Dawn Ring, who had planned on a career in the Navy, reverberated yesterday at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Baltimore, where she had worked full time since June 2007, managing logistics for students in corporate internship programs.

Nine Maryland high schools have been removed from the state's watch list after performing well enough to leave a required improvement process, officials said yesterday. Three other schools - in Baltimore City and Frederick and Montgomery counties - have been added to that list, having failed to make "adequate yearly progress" two years in a row. "We've had some nice improvements this year that have been not the result of one year's work in schools, but rather represent what's been happening over several years," said Ronald A. Peiffer, Maryland deputy state school superintendent.

On the opening day of school in Baltimore this week, Anthony Geraci, the new head of food services for the city schools, watched with delight as a first-grader at Calvin Rodwell Elementary School bit into a fresh peach from a Maryland farm. "There was peach juice dribbling down his chin and this big smile on his face," Mr. Geraci said. "It was the first time he ever tasted a peach that wasn't from a can." With food prices rising nationally, school districts across the country are charging more for school lunches to keep up with costs.

When 850,000 Maryland students head back to classrooms this week, a tiny but growing percentage will be in public schools that had only been imagined a decade ago. There's a primary school that lets children work at their own pace, an elementary school where 7-year-olds speak French a good portion of the day and a middle school where a sixth-grader can experience the outdoors. In the first few years of Maryland's experiment with charter schools, Baltimore led the way with an explosion of new schools of all varieties.