Younger Children

ELEMENTARY education desperately needs more then a few good men.That struck me again last week at the annual conference of the state's reading teachers. Of 1,100 packed into the Towson Sheraton, only a few were male. The younger the child, the more unlikely he or she will have a male teacher. Male reading teachers are as scarce as Dick and Jane books.The situation is getting worse. The proportion of males in the national teaching force declined from about a third in 1961 to about a fourth in 1996.

This is the month to shiver and scream. Throughout the nation, scary or zany Halloween events are being held. Among them: Universal Orlando says its Halloween Horror Nights, running through Nov. 3, may be too intense for younger children, what with the presence of such film luminaries as Freddy, Jason, and Leatherface. Among the attractions are eight haunted houses, four new shows and a Midway of the Bizarre. You can pay $64.95 for a ticket and pick your date, or for the same price you can get admission on 13 selected nights, including Halloween.

The arrest this past week of a 10-year-old on drug charges in East Baltimore is a sign of what the police fear may be a dangerous new twist in the city's drug trade: As more and more young children become involved, more and more could fall victim to violence.Vulnerable to intimidation by older dealers or lured by the prospect of easy money, younger children are likely to become increasingly at risk in the city's escalating drug violence.Time-worn anti-drug slogans, like former first lady Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No," simply have little or no meaning in the reality of many pre-teens, who are continuously exposed to drugs in some of the city's poorest and toughest neighborhoods, according to narcotics officers.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that MedImmune has addressed problems at its FluMist manufacturing plant in Europe. The move clears the way for the agency to also consider an application requesting that a new version of the influenza vaccine be approved for use in children younger than 5. In May, the FDA sent a warning letter to the Gaithersburg company and said it would withhold approval of the drug for younger children until problems...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that MedImmune has addressed problems at its FluMist manufacturing plant in Europe. The move clears the way for the agency to also consider an application requesting that a new version of the influenza vaccine be approved for use in children younger than 5. In May, the FDA sent a warning letter to the Gaithersburg company and said it would withhold approval of the drug for younger children until problems...

This is the month to shiver and scream. Throughout the nation, scary or zany Halloween events are being held. Among them: Universal Orlando says its Halloween Horror Nights, running through Nov. 3, may be too intense for younger children, what with the presence of such film luminaries as Freddy, Jason, and Leatherface. Among the attractions are eight haunted houses, four new shows and a Midway of the Bizarre. You can pay $64.95 for a ticket and pick your date, or for the same price you can get admission on 13 selected nights, including Halloween.

They call themselves the Dream Team.A loose coalition of government workers and children's advocates, they are united by their dream of making a difference for families living in the public housing projects.Representatives from the Anne Arundel Housing Authority, the Department of Recreation and Parks and county government met last week tomap strategies for new services."I think there's a lot of good this group can do," said Karen Michalec, the county's coordinator of social services, who dubbed the informal committee the "Dream Team."

It's almost dismissal time at Northfield Elementary. While a third-grade teacher begins gathering children for the bus, aides circulate among the "walkers," keeping those kids focused on their worksheets. "It helps you practice your skills you've learned," aide Elizabeth Mackey said. Elizabeth, 10, and more than 25 fellow fifth-graders are members of a peer mentoring program at the Ellicott City school. Some work one-on-one with partners in lower grades. Others, such as Elizabeth, mentor an entire class for a half-hour once or twice a week.

IN UNSURE and dangerous times, how can a parent reassure a child that the school playground and neighborhood streets are safe? Thirteen months ago, this question was raised in a most horrific and graphic way. Now, in Maryland, it has been raised again. People of all ages, races and genders are being killed at random. These people were not working in the Pentagon or the World Trade Center. They were following their daily existence in their communities by shopping, filling their car's gas tank and entering school.

TEN years ago there was only one sure way to test a child's reading ability. It had nothing to do with the SAT or any other exam and didn't involve a sharpened No. 2 pencil.If you really wanted to know how well a group of kids could read you put them all on a bus and drove them down Baltimore Street. Kids who stuttered over Dick and Jane in the class room could spit out every club name, headliner and advertisement on the Block verbatim as it flashed by at 30 mph through a grimy school bus window.

Arecent study reported more instances of hypertension in younger children than previously realized. In addition, many young children are malnourished, causing them to be underweight or overweight. While much attention has rightly been paid to the troubling increase in childhood obesity, the growing prevalence of other, linked diseases among children should be equally alarming and generate more preventive action on the part of parents, doctors and schools. The study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association last week found that doctors fail to diagnose high blood pressure in more than 75 percent of young children who have it, in part perhaps because some symptoms are not manifested in children.

Finding too much in foster care study The Sun's editorial "Family ties" (July 16) derives a range of implications for foster care and group care policy based on a large study of children in Illinois. However, one very important point missed in the discussion of this large study is that the children in the study were ages 5 to 15 at the time of the family's investigation for child abuse and neglect and the child's admission into the study. If children were younger than 5, they were not included in the study - and kids in this young age group represent a substantial proportion of children who enter foster care in Baltimore.

Alex Wachter was trying to conjure words for an ode to the Super Bowl. The 17-year-old could have been home getting a head start on his homework or working an after-school job. Instead, he was in the computer lab at Tyler Heights Elementary School with fifth-grader Enner Canales trying to finish the youngster's poem, "The Super Bowl is Cool." "The Redskins are to the ground. The Ravens are to the heavens," Enner said, reading his typed words aloud. "That doesn't make sense," Wachter said as he smiled and looked over Enner's shoulder at the computer screen.

Normally, moms drop off their kids at the Harford County camp and run errands before returning later in the day to pick them up. But not yesterday, the latest in a string of extremely hot days, and not when it's a skating camp in the cool Ice World in Abingdon. With the temperature in the two rinks at about 25 degrees and waiting rooms feeling like an air-conditioned home, many parents opted to hang out and balance checkbooks, catch up on phone calls or play games with their younger children until the figure skaters and hockey players were finished.

It's 4 p.m., twilight's witching hour, and children all over America are starting to get restless. Here in my house it's fairly quiet. I'm making dinner with one son, age 4, who is whisking the oil and vinegar for a salad dressing. My other two boys, ages 5 and 2, are in the family room. One is playing with Legos; the other is listening to a CD and reading a comic book. There is no television blaring in the family room, no Sesame Street video teaching them their letters. There never is. And five years into this "zero-TV experiment" my husband and I embarked on, there never has been.

While 10 third-graders were playing with antique toys that held their attention like video games, 86 older children in a nearby pavilion were practicing moves they had learned at a martial arts demonstration. While the third-graders were making fishing poles out of bamboo, the older children were standing in formation ready to address their officers as "sir." The scenes took place recently at the Carroll County Farm Museum, where two contrasting day camps were being held. One was the Living History Camp, sponsored by the museum, where campers learned about life in the 1890s.

BALTIMORE COUNTY'S greatest social challenges are its young and its old. The population is increasingly gray, with more than one-seventh of residents 60 or older, and that number expected to grow rapidly through 2005. With budget constraints forcing cutbacks in government services and families without time or energy to care for their own, the job of looking after old people will increasingly fall on charitable organizations -- or go undone.The same goes for children. Recent studies show that while kids in suburban Baltimore are far better off than their city counterparts, many suffer from having both parents (or the only parent)

Arecent study reported more instances of hypertension in younger children than previously realized. In addition, many young children are malnourished, causing them to be underweight or overweight. While much attention has rightly been paid to the troubling increase in childhood obesity, the growing prevalence of other, linked diseases among children should be equally alarming and generate more preventive action on the part of parents, doctors and schools. The study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association last week found that doctors fail to diagnose high blood pressure in more than 75 percent of young children who have it, in part perhaps because some symptoms are not manifested in children.

On the barren playground where he played touch football and once hung a milk crate on a pole so younger children could shoot hoops, 14-year-old Walker Louis Coleman IV was sprawled on his back, bleeding from two bullet wounds. The playground had once been sort of a sanctuary for Walker, who would sit alone on a concrete bench at the edge of the asphalt, listening to rap music through earphones, thinking, dreaming, oblivious to the busy pace of life around him. Now East Baltimore's dangerous streets had claimed another victim.

Marguerite Forte-Hondroulis teaches economics, holding forth on complicated concepts like scarcity and opportunity cost. Her pupils need to know these things, she said. Even though they are only 8 years old. Economics is part of the studies in Forte-Hondroulis' third-grade classes. So is the poetry of Robert Frost, along with probability and statistics. Elementary education isn't what it used to be. At Timonium Elementary School, Forte-Hondroulis still takes her pupils outside to play, but she also teaches about specialization in the American economy and capital resources.