School Starts

THE FIRST day of school rather than the first day of the new year has always meant a fresh start to me.Nothing seems as "new" on Jan. 1 as it does on Sept. 1: new shoes; stiff, new jeans; a clean backpack; a fresh haircut; unsharpened pencils, fresh paper. What does New Year's Day have to compare with these things?My back-to-school days are far behind me, but my children approach the first day of school with a kind of anticipation matched only by Christmas Day, and their excitement vibrates in some long forgotten place inside of me.Like them, I begin each new school year with fresh resolutions.

The HCPSS board is researching the feasibility of later high school start times. This could have a great impact on many students around the county and I fully back this proposal. As a high school student, I can visibly see the effects of sleep deprivation on students. I am looking for an increase in support from the school board. Specifically, I would like to see the school board push high school start times to later than the current start time of 7:20 a.m. In studies done by the National Sleep Foundation, National Department of Transportation and Center Disease Control and Prevention, they found that only 31 percent of high school students reported getting a sufficient eight hours of sleep.

Touching, name-calling and unwanted attention are increasingly prevalent in schools, students say, and one Harford County teen has decided it's time to fight back.Nicole Bonis is setting up her own feminist group to address a variety of topics from sexual harassment to women's health."I've wanted to do this since starting high school," says Nicole, an 11th-grader at Bel Air High School who says she has experienced sexual harassment at school."It's so rampant," the 17-year-old says. "I try not to let it get to me."

Thank heavens that the Anne Arundel County school system is finally looking at starting high school at a time when teenagers are fully awake ("Md. school systems study later start for high schools," March 11). Of course, it is typical that their study fails to consider the benefits to the students of a later start by focusing only on logistics and cost of such a change. If benefits to students had been of interest, they would have changed the start times for high school to a reasonable hour years ago and perhaps both improved student performance and avoided the all too frequently fatal automobile accidents that seem to occur more among student drivers hurrying on their way to school in the morning.

Sitting at the desk that would be hers for the school year, Casey Burton peered inside the new, black backpack she found hanging on the back of her chair and smiled. "Look, you got a notebook this year," said her mother, Rebecca West. The 7-year-old's smile grew wider as West pointed out other materials: a new pencil box, fresh pencils, crayons and scissors. "And," the second-grader said, holding them up with a grin, "I got glue sticks." She and hundreds of others had poured into Dundalk's Sandy Plains Elementary on Friday afternoon for "Sneak a Peek at Your Seat," during which they met their teachers, explored their classrooms and glimpsed some of the classmates they would be rubbing elbows with Monday, when school starts in Baltimore County.

The spell of summer began to break yesterday, as Jessica Rennenkampf admired Sleeping Beauty's castle at the Enchanted Forest theme park in Ellicott City.And these were the magic words: "School starts Monday.""I'm sort of excited, and sort of not," said Jessica, 7, who will be a second-grader at Jeffers Hill Elementary School in Columbia. "I'm not going to have as much time to read, and I won't be able to horseback-ride much, and we won't be able to take four-day weekends."You could almost hear the collective sigh this week, as thousands of students in Howard, Carroll and Anne Arundel counties thought briefly about going back to school on Monday -- and savored their last few days of summer vacation.

The last days of summer break are slowly ticking away, and James Reynolds is scrambling. In between serving customers and running the shop at the Great Cookie in Mondawmin Mall, where he works full time, the 16-year-old City College student is trying to squeeze in reading all 320 pages of a book about genocide in the 1930s Dominican Republic. Studying The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat is not exactly the way he wants to spend his final flash of freedom, Reynolds says with a sigh, but he is determined to get a good start on his senior year when school starts Monday.

Outfitting herself to go back to school next week, 14-year-old Courtney Lancos, a freshman at Howard County's Atholton High, bought two flannel shirts earlier this week -- plaid flannel shirts, of course."

Less than eight weeks before school starts, the city needs six principals and more than 400 teachers, despite an effort launched two years ago to do more hiring earlier. As of last week, 505 teachers had been hired to fill 934 vacancies, Theodore E. Thornton, human resources director, told the school board Tuesday night. The number of remaining vacancies, now 429, could grow by Saturday, the deadline for teachers to tell the school system whether they are leaving. "We've got a daunting task," J. Tyson Tildon, school board president, said yesterday.

I can't wait until school starts at Maryland. Why? Because the only thing open in the student union - where I spend a majority of my time these days - is McDonald's. So I was cranky and hungry when we walked into Ralph Friedgen's office Tuesday afternoon, and he was a little feisty himself. This is probably why: "The defense played very well. They kicked the offense's [butt]," he said. "Outhustled them, out-toughed them. Just kicked them all over the field." I asked him if he has added a second player to his 105-man practice roster.

It is 6:45 a.m. and Severna Park High School freshman Chelsea Rogers has a decision to make: skip the most important meal of the day or skip the school bus. "There's no time for breakfast," said Rogers after reaching the corner of Hill Road and Baltimore Annapolis Boulevard in Severna Park, where the bus will take her to school in time for classes to begin at 7:17 a.m. She said she hadn't had a bite since 8 p.m. the night before and wouldn't eat...

The beginning of the school year often means morning battles between parents and their children who don't want to get out of bed in the morning. But a good night's sleep is crucial to a student's performance in school. Dr. Scott Krugman, chairman of the department of pediatrics at MedStar Franklin Square Medical Center and the vice president of the Maryland Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, talks about children's sleep patterns and how to get them on a workable sleep schedule.

Here's fair warning for students: Monday isn't just the first day of school in Baltimore City and the surrounding five counties, it's the beginning of life with a whole new set of expectations from teachers. There's going to be a lot more writing, more researching and more emphasis on being able to argue a point, even in math and science classes. And math classes will likely go more in-depth and cover less material. For the first time in a decade, what gets taught in classrooms across the state is shifting under a new set of standards for reading and math adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

Twenty-two Baltimore schools will open Monday without permanent principals in place, continuing the unprecedented turnover under Andrés Alonso — moves that the administrators union says reflect "vindictive" and "capricious" decisions by the schools chief. The union's president, Jimmy Gittings, said Alonso demoted 15 principals, including four whose schools are being investigated for possible cheating on state tests. He said two of the four were placed back in the classroom as teachers after an investigation turned up no evidence.

Not much happens on the last day of school, but at Villa Cresta Elementary in Baltimore County, the principal made sure students would remember Friday. She marched up to the roof with a microphone and danced in front of hundreds of students who joined in to celebrate the last couple hours of the school year. Kathleen Bishop is retiring this year after 30 years in education, the last eight years as principal at Vista Cresta. She has taken to the roof before — dressed as a witch to raise money for school events — but this was done as a surprise for her students.

Data-stream around Grandpa, youngsters 2.1 and 3.1, while he tells you about the time long, long ago when a certain elected official grew so nostalgic about a time even longer ago when Labor Day marked the beginning of the school year. Way back in the last millenium, people always knew that public schools started the day after Labor Day. Why begin classes that Tuesday? Well, probably because the school calendar was based on the farm calendar and the growing season. It might also have just been a convenient date.

The Baltimore County school system is reclaiming another school, the former Inverness Elementary at 8301 Lynch Road in Inverness on the county's east side.Beginning this fall, the school will become Inverness Center, an alternative middle school for students considered too disruptive for their home schools.It will house the alternative program started last year at Eastwood Center, a former special education school on Westham Way in the Dundalk area.In June, the school system took back the old Campfield Elementary School building from the county, also for use as an alternative school.

Teachers, administrators, parents and students touted last night what they described as recent improvements in safety in Baltimore City public schools.Their remarks came at a community forum at Harford Heights Elementary School in East Baltimore called by the school board and Superintendent Walter G. Amprey.The forum, attended by about 125 people, was held two weeks after a grand jury faulted the school system's "piecemeal" approach to curbing crime. The panel said the system has failed to reduce the growing problem of student violence.

It was hard to tell whether his eyes were actually open when Derek Jones shuffled into his dimly lit kitchen at 5:45 a.m., the smell of bacon in the air. The 16-year-old didn't speak, but took directions from his mother who whispered: "I have your coffee made and your breakfast sandwich ready. " Within minutes he had munched on a banana, downed a cup of java, grabbed his egg bagel and backpack and was in the car on his way to the bus stop with his father. By 6:12 a.m. he was boarding the bus, and by 7:17 a.m., whether ready to learn or not, Jones was in his pre-calculus class at South River High School in Anne Arundel County.

A literal case of cold feet and an article about students who eat one bag lunch and give away another helped inspire two Baltimore County classmates to organize efforts to benefit those in need. Joe Hash and Danny Sauter, both eighth-graders at St. Mark School in Catonsville, have launched individual collection drives that are making a difference in the lives of people served by two local institutions. Joe's project, which he calls the Double Lunch Ministry, involves encouraging students to bring two bag lunches to school once each month for donation to Our Daily Bread, a meal program in Baltimore.