Youth Programs

Jake Hughes is a shade taller than the kids in his class, but his interests are typical of a fourth-grader. The Edgewood youth plays football, lacrosse and baseball. He plays drums and loves to read. What distinguishes the 9-year-old from his peers surfaced long ago: Jake recognized all the letters of the alphabet by age 2. He was reading in preschool. Early on in first grade, he was reading chapter books and doing advanced math. Although Jake has never taken a formal IQ test, he has excelled academically.

Sifting through buckets of dirt in a Hampden backyard, 15-year-old Anthony Williams believes he has found something to add to the plastic bag of pottery and glass bottle fragments at his feet. He bounds over to David Gadsby, one of two graduate students leading the dig, and shows him the potential artifact. "That," Gadsby says, "is a rock." It doesn't matter. Since the beginning of the month, Williams and other city students have been digging through people's backyards in and around Hampden, searching for anything that might help paint a better picture of working-class Baltimore during the 1800s.

As in all youth sports, baseball operates with a hierarchy based mainly on ability. Beginners, players with limited skills, and some with conflicting spare-time pursuits stick to recreation-level teams and leagues. Kids with the best skills and, in some cases, kids being pushed hard by parents find themselves on travel teams, practicing more frequently and competing in regional rather than local leagues. In general, travel players and their coaches are focused more on winning than those at the rec level.

After Chris Carter met professional bowler Parker Bohn III last year, his star-struck mother, Ginny Carter, told him not to wash. After all, he had just shaken hands with one of the biggest names in bowling. "I don't think that before that day they knew what it meant to play with Parker Bohn," she said of Chris, 16, and his brother, Kyle, 18. The Freeland residents were looking forward to mixing with some of bowling's top stars again this weekend at the Professional Bowlers Association Wild Turkey Bourbon East Region tournament at Forest Hill Lanes.

The Baltimore City Council unanimously approved Mayor Martin O'Malley's $2.32 billion budget last night for the fiscal year that begins July 1, a plan that boosts public safety spending and reduces the city's property tax rate to its lowest level in three decades. O'Malley's fiscal 2006 budget represents a 6.5 percent increase over current spending, and includes raises for city government workers and more funding for the Police Department and the state's attorney's office. Youth advocates cheered as the three-month process ended with the council's approval of O'Malley's plan to spend much of the closing fiscal year's surplus on programs for children.

An influential Baltimore citizens group is asking city officials to use more of the city's budget surplus to promote after-school programs for children. The group, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), is lobbying for $5.9 million of the surplus to be earmarked for in-school programs and community-based youth programs. So far, city leaders have said they will set aside $3.4 million for in-school programs. Mayor Martin O'Malley has said a large portion of the $59 million surplus needs to be used to cover overspending by some city agencies.

For David W. Hornbeck, it's not that far a cry from the tough urban schools of Baltimore and Philadelphia to those of Lima, Peru, where children grow up in poverty, and drugs and violence are commonplace. Hornbeck served 12 years as Maryland state schools chief and six as superintendent in rough-and-tumble Philadelphia. Now he's back in Baltimore at the nerve center of a worldwide network of organizations devoted to improving the lives of boys, girls and young adults. Hornbeck is the new president and chief operating officer of the International Youth Foundation, a 14-year-old philanthropic organization that awards money to youth programs - many of them politically sensitive - in 53 countries, yet has little visibility in its hometown.

The Howard County Youth Program, a nonprofit sports association, will award its $1,000 Christopher Kelley Memorial Scholarship to a high school senior who has participated in HCYP-sponsored sports - baseball, softball, volleyball and basketball. The scholarship, in its 11th year, commemorates the life of Christopher Kelley, an eighth-grader at Glenwood Middle School who played baseball in the youth program and was killed in 1989 when his bicycle was struck by a car. "Because of his death, the kids in his class lobbied the County Council, which passed the first bicycle helmet law in the country," said his father, Thomas A. Kelley.

The 51-year-old former volunteer treasurer of a Columbia youth football club pleaded guilty yesterday to stealing thousands of dollars from the organization and from her former employer. Harriet Williams of Ellicott City pleaded guilty to two counts of felony theft by scheme even though prosecutors said they intend to ask for significant jail time - five to seven years - at her June 11 sentencing in front of Howard Circuit Judge Diane O. Leasure. Williams' attorney, Steven A. Allen, is expected to ask Leasure for a more lenient sentence.

Roxanna Cornish was at her wit's end. Her son, Eric Williams, 15, was skipping school, getting high and hanging with a bad crowd. She feared he would die on Baltimore's rough streets. So one day Cornish approached a police officer and pleaded for help with Eric. That's when she learned about Intervention Services for At-risk Youth, or ISAY, a program that puts social workers in the city's nine police districts so they can work with youths 12 to 17 who are cutting classes, having conflicts with their parents or siblings, doing drugs and getting arrested.