Test Results

If you're wondering why the Major League Baseball Players Association disagreed with this week's appellate court ruling that will allow the Justice Department to use the confiscated results of confidential steroid testing in future prosecutions, you need only to look at the recent comments of the lawyer for embattled superstar Barry Bonds. Michael Rains hinted Wednesday that he has a government source who cast doubt on whether prosecutors will gain anything from the test results that would help in their investigation into whether Bonds committed perjury when he told the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative grand jury that he never knowingly used steroids.

A lawyer for the state health department pledged Monday in Baltimore Circuit Court to retrieve and safeguard records of Maryland children tested for lead poisoning, resolving a complaint by lawyers for poisoned children over the agency's recent destruction of thousands of paper records of those tests. Matthew Fader, assistant attorney general representing the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told Judge Pamela J. White that he had reached an agreement with lawyers bringing lawsuits on behalf of lead-poisoned children to keep all remaining paper test results and to try to restore electronic records that had also been deleted.

The test results have produced as many questions as answers so far, but Carroll and state officials are examining what might have led to a precipitous drop in third-grade social studies scores on the Maryland School Performance and Assessment Program tests.The drop is statewide -- 80 percent of elementary schools saw their third-grade social studies scores go down. In Carroll, the decline was smaller than statewide, and six of the county's 18 elementary schools' scores in that category actually went up, said Peggy Altoff, social studies supervisor for Carroll.

Baltimore prosecutors say they have been dropping a growing number of drug cases because the city police crime laboratory has failed to provide them with basic test results. Clearly frustrated by what they call slow progress in fixing problems that surfaced more than a year ago, prosecutors said city police are not seriously addressing the issue. "We are concerned about this issue and how it affects public safety," Margaret T. Burns, a spokeswoman for the Baltimore state's attorney's office, said last week.

The defense case of Baltimore police Officer Edward T. Gorwell II was further bolstered yesterday with test results from a Pennsylvania laboratory, which confirmed the presence of gunshot residue on the hand of the teen-ager Gorwell shot and killed April 17, 1993.The results, which verified a police lab test last week, appeared to reinforce Gorwell's long-standing contention that he was returning fire when he shot 14-year-old Simmont "Sam" Thomas, though no gun was found at the scene."We have to look at how this would be viewed by a trier of fact," Deputy State's Attorney Sharon May said yesterday.

Anne Arundel County health officials continued testing Rock Creek in Pasadena yesterday, after the discovery Saturday of a 150,000-gallon sewage spill. The cause was determined to be a blocked waste line. Test results from samples collected from the creek are expected by tomorrow, said Gerry Zitnik, a Health Department program manager.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris issued a memo to officers yesterday reminding them to take copies of drug analysis reports to court, a week after prosecutors complained that hundreds of cases have been dropped, dismissed or postponed because they never received test results. "We want them to come to court prepared," said Kristen Mahoney, who oversees grants and government relations for the Police Department. Police officials also said they are addressing another dispute that flared between prosecutors and police in recent weeks: officers failing to appear in court.

The high-decibel chatter that occasionally typified the start of my 12th-grade English class was suddenly silenced. "I want this noise to stop!" our teacher roared, accentuating her words by slapping her palm on the desk. As we sat stunned, wondering what had we done to derail her normally genteel disposition, she lashed out again: Our daily horseplay, she insisted, indicated how we rarely took classwork seriously. And that, she said, was why we and other South Carolina students were making headlines for performing poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)

An Owings Mills woman is suing Maryland General Hospital for $2 million, claiming that the Baltimore hospital "derailed my life" by inaccurately telling her she was HIV-positive. Robyn Joynes-Carey, 35, filed the suit Wednesday in Baltimore Circuit Court, alleging that the hospital was negligent. Hospital spokesman Lee Kennedy called the lawsuit "frivolous" and said in a statement that the allegations against the hospital were false. "The hospital will defend [itself] vigorously," he said.

Education Alternatives, the Minneapolis company that manages public schools for profit, says it has overstated the academic progress of students attending the schools it manages in Baltimore.In an admission that is sure to fuel the debate over the privatization of public schools, Education Alternatives said yesterday its error in reporting the Baltimore test scores had been "completely unintentional." It corrected the error yesterday; the mistake was reported last weekend by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.