Seven Oaks

Altieri Homes has two floor plans available at Seven Oaks in Anne Arundel County. The community features a party room, exercise room, pool, tennis courts, basketball court, tot lot and nature walk. The model, the Faith Victoria, starts at $128,990 for 1,440 square feet. The first floor consists of a 10-by-18-foot living room, kitchen; 9-by-8-foot dining room; and 10-by-17-foot family room. The second floor consists of a 10-by-9-foot bedroom; 9-by-12-foot bedroom; bathroom; and 14-by-15-foot master bedroom with walk-in closet and master bath.

This week, beginning Tuesday, Feb. 19, Seven Oaks Elementary School in Perry Hall will help students celebrate diversity through the school's annual “African American Read-In Chain.” Throughout the week, visitors to the school will share with students some of their favorite  literature written by African American authors.   Some of the school's scheduled readers are Sen. Katherine Klausmeier, Delsgates John Cluster and Eric Bromwell, County Councilman David Marks, and several Baltimore County Public Schools friends and educators, as well as former Seven Oaks Elementary administrators and teachers.

A shopping center for the Seven Oaks development in Odenton moved one step closer to reality Friday, when a county hearing officer consolidated two parcels of land into one commercial district.About 3.5of the 20 acres slated for a neighborhood shopping center were zonedfor residential use. The Halle Cos. claimed a mistake was made during the county's 1988 comprehensive rezoning. The county agreed.The remaining 16.5 acres of the parcel are zoned to allow commercial uses. Now, all 20 acres are zoned commercial.

A large, two-alarm fire tore through an Odenton apartment building near Fort Meade on Wednesday afternoon, damaging 12 units and displacing about 30 people, according to the Anne Arundel Fire Department. The fire occurred in the same Seven Oaks complex that was damaged by another two-alarm fire in September. No injuries were reported, and the cause of the fire remained under investigation, said Chief Michael Cox, a department spokesman. Firefighters responded about 1:11 p.m. to find fire coming from the rear of the building, burning up the complex's three stories.

For the third time in four years, a group of parents in the racially mixed Seven Oaks neighborhood of Odenton is challenging the county school board's decision to shift its students from the mostly white Arundel Senior High School feeder system into the half-minority Meade Senior High School system.The latest appeal was sent Friday to the state Department of Education and targets the redistricting plan the board came up with last month. State officials are still deliberating about some of the same racially charged issues brought to it in the group's appeal of the board's 1995 redistricting plan.

With its homes and stores, and a new school and second community center, Seven Oaks in Odenton is just about fully built out. Its leafy streets loop into landscaped cul-de-sacs with tot lots, and its swimming pools are taking the holiday weekend to open for the season. A committee just formed to look into creating a dog park. The homeowners' association is planning its summer-kickoff barbecue for several hundred people for the first weekend in June. Children are walking from school. "It's peaceful," said longtime resident Linda Goodman, noting neighbors look out for each other.

Worried that a redistricting plan proposed by the Anne Arundel Board of Education would lower minority enrollment at West County schools, residents of Seven Oaks have come up with their own alternatives to relieve overcrowding."

Baltimore County will have to wait another year for the opening of its next new school, Seven Oaks Elementary, officials said yesterday.Seven Oaks was scheduled to be ready for the 1991-1992 school year, but construction problems have delayed the opening until September 1992, said Keith Kelley, associate superintendent for physical facilities."

A state judge is recommending that the 1995 Anne Arundel County school redistricting plan -- a document that is the basis for last year's redistricting and the basis of proposals for redrawing school attendance areas this spring -- be overturned.Administrative Law Judge Georgia B. Powell based her recommendation on the contentious switch of the Seven Oaks community from the Arundel feeder system to Meade, which she said made no sense. A feeder system is the set of elementary and middle schools whose students are funneled to a particular senior high school.

An Anne Arundel judge has blocked the county school board's effort to shift students in a racially mixed neighborhood from schools that serve a mostly white population to schools that are half-minority.Circuit Judge Pamela North yesterday threw out the local board's appeal of a state school board decision that keeps children who live in the Seven Oaks community in the western part of the county out of Meade Senior High School and the schools that feed it.L The court has no jurisdiction to hear the appeal, she ruled.

Baltimore County Councilman David Marks, a Perry Hall Republican, now holds regular office hours at the Seven Oaks Senior Center every first and third Friday of the month. The senior center hours, which began Nov. 18, allow residents to meet with him on issues of their choosing. Councilman Marks is available from 1 to 3 p.m. every first and third Friday of the month at the center. The Seven Oaks Senior Center is located at 9210 Seven Courts Drive, in Perry Hall. Marks expressed his thanks to the senior center for allowing him to meet constituents at the facility.

* The Baltimore County Department of Aging will present information sessions at county senior centers this week on how senior citizens can manage and treat arthritis. The sessions are: 11 a.m. Monday at Seven Oaks; 11 a.m. Tuesday, Parkville; 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, Ateaze in Dundalk; 1 p.m. Thursday, Cockeysville; and 10 a.m. Friday, Bykota in Towson. Call 410-887-2594 or visit baltimorecountymd.gov/aging.

With its homes and stores, and a new school and second community center, Seven Oaks in Odenton is just about fully built out. Its leafy streets loop into landscaped cul-de-sacs with tot lots, and its swimming pools are taking the holiday weekend to open for the season. A committee just formed to look into creating a dog park. The homeowners' association is planning its summer-kickoff barbecue for several hundred people for the first weekend in June. Children are walking from school. "It's peaceful," said longtime resident Linda Goodman, noting neighbors look out for each other.

Seven Oaks Elementary School was built two years ago, but only this week are its teachers decorating its bulletin boards and its students settling into their desks. The building, which served as a long-term way station for Meade Heights Elementary School students and staff displaced by construction at a third school, is in the rare circumstance of creating a new identity, with a new name and new blend of teachers and students. First-grade teacher Julie Hesenperger said she felt comfortable, despite - or maybe because of - her unfamiliar surroundings.

ISSUE: The Anne Arundel County school board ceded to pleas last week to allow most students from the Seven Oaks community to remain at Arundel High, a vote that some said merely delayed the tougher decision on how to solve school crowding in West County. Superintendent Kevin M. Maxwell had recommended moving 344 students from Arundel High in Gambrills to Meade High at Fort Meade to ease crowding at Arundel, which has nine portable classrooms to handle the overflow. He had said he was amenable to allowing next school year's juniors and seniors from Seven Oaks to stay at Arundel.

Some Anne Arundel County school board members are calling for an overhaul of the school system's "piecemeal" year-to-year redistricting method after a battle with Odenton parents. This week, the board ceded to pleas to allow most students from the Seven Oaks community to remain at Arundel High, a vote that some said merely delayed the tougher decision on how to solve school crowding in West County. "We just diluted the issue instead of dealing with it," said school board Vice President Eugene Peterson, who voted against the measure to leave Seven Oaks children at Arundel.

The residents of Seven Oaks in Odenton and nearby business owners along Route 175 have put up with petty theft, vandalism and holdups for years. But crime struck too violently to ignore one Saturday in August when liquor store owner Thomas Hall was gunned down in his shop."

LaTonya McKellery would rather get a second job to pay for her two daughters to go to private school than send them to Meade High School. For the six years she has lived in the Seven Oaks community in Odenton, McKellery has filled out transfer forms to enroll her children into elementary and middle schools that she felt were academically stronger than those in the Meade feeder system. A South Carolina native, she said she saw her family and other families of color steered toward inferior schools, jobs and services.