Lawrence Swoboda grew up in Rodgers Forge and waxes nostalgic about his years as a student at Dumbarton Middle School in the early 1980s, when it was a junior high school.
"It was very much a neighborhood school," Swoboda said. He has especially fond memories of playing sports on Dumbarton's fields.
"It was great having all those fields," he said. "For gym class, you'd put on your gym clothes and go out on those fields and play soccer."
On Sunday, Swoboda, now 43 and president of the Rodgers Forge Community Association, stood outside Dumbarton with his young son, William, and said the school hasn't changed much since it was built in the 1950s. He said he would like to see it improved — especially with a new air-conditioning system — for the community's sake and the sake of his son, a first-grader at Rodgers Forge Elementary, which is a feeder school for Dumbarton.
What he doesn't want to see, he said, are the kinds of "severe" changes that the Baltimore County school system has proposed for Dumbarton, which he and other community leaders say would change its look and design for the worse and result in the loss of nine old trees — including one said to be planted by John Hopkins, the founder of Johns Hopkins University, from a seed that came from Bethlehem.
Now, after meeting last week with school system officials and architects for the $27.5 million project, a committee for the association may have convinced the school system to scale down the project, which originally called for a large paved bus lot, additional parking behind the school, a new bus loop at the front of the school and regrading along Dumbarton Road with a large retaining wall.
There was also fear in the community that Dumbarton House, an old building, which is home to the Baltimore Actors' Theatre Conservatory, that faces the school, would lose much of its tree canopy.
"All we were seeking were internal improvements," including new air conditioning, remodeling of the interior and a technology upgrade for the school, Swoboda said. "The (school system) plan almost reflected a reality that didn't exist. The question came up, 'Why are you doing all this?'"
"I think the plan that we saw (at first) was a little extensive," said Bryan Tilllman, vice president of the association, who also went to Dumbarton Middle as a youth.
Gathering at the school with Swoboda on rainy Saturday morning, were other members of the association's executive committee, including Janice Moore, John Rinehart, Bryan Tillman and Carol Zielke.
"I'm tickled pink that the school is finally getting the attention it deserves," said Moore, past association and PTA president, who lives across the street from the school. "We just didn't want to look at a retaining wall."
"We're very happy that they're not taking down the trees," Zielke said.
No one is quite sure how much the project will be scaled down, and Mychael Dickerson, a spokesman for the school system, declined to comment on the recent meeting or the school system's intentions now. Dickerson said he could not comment until the working committee makes recommendations to the county school board.
"The working committee was just that, a working committee," Dickerson said.
None of the people who came to the school on Saturday was on the working committee. But Swoboda is convinced that school system officials are listening.
"Everybody at the end of the day finally got it," he said, crediting County Councilman David Marks, State Sen. Jim Brochin and Del. Steve Lafferty with coming to the community's aid on the issue.
"None of that stuff is going to happen," Zielke said.
In an irony, Rinehart said the cost, now $24.5 million, is roughly the same, but he is happy that "we're doing less (for) the same amount of cost."
And, Zielke told Swoboda, "It will be done by the time your son gets here."