Is Carroll Selling Its Teachers Short?

Recently, I briefly presented a citizen's concern at the July meeting of the Carroll County school board about the need for more teacher planning time in high school. I spoke out on this issue for three related reasons.

First, I'm a high school teacher in a neighboring county where teachers normally have five classes during a seven-period day. I was surprised to find out earlier this year that my children's teachers at Francis Scott Key High . . . teach six classes in a seven-period day.

What this means is that teachers here have less time to plan for entire class needs and also less time to meet some of the individual needs that the 130 to 180 students they meet daily might have.

It was reported at this same school board meeting that violent outbursts in Carroll County schools are increasing. Certainly many more of our youth than just those who act out need caring adults around with a little more time to give them.

My second reason for speaking out concerned teacher access to telephones at Francis Scott Key. FSK teachers do not have departmental offices with phones available to facilitate communication with parents. Where I teach, each department, including the foreign language department to which I belong, has a separate line into the school. Use of the phone for professional reasons is never really a problem. Concerned parents can easily reach teachers during their planning time and concerned teachers can get in touch with parents to problem-solve together for students success.

My third reason for speaking out concerned a high school teacher important to my children who expressed interest in working in neighboring counties where more in-school planning time is provided. An elementary teacher friend had mentioned an article in a local newspaper last year that stated Carroll County loses more teachers to other counties than any other Maryland county. . . .

New teachers need time to settle in before they reach their most effective levels of teaching. The first year is seldom as good as subsequent years in this complex business. A child who gets too many new teachers along their educational path is likely not to have gotten as good an education as they could have were the majority of their teachers more experienced. . . .

Quite a number of elementary teachers also expressed a need for more planning time at this school board meeting. The exciting and beneficial initiatives at the early childhood/elementary level do need more time to implement correctly. These healthy innovations are spreading up through the higher grades as well. Conscientious, dedicated teachers . . . need more in-school planning time to do a good job at school, care for their families at home and get the necessary sleep to function under demanding conditions again the next day in the classroom.

The public simply needs to wake up and recognize how hard caring teachers work and that excellent public education (and other excellent public services such as universal health care) truly strengthens our country to compete in the world. However, these items cost money. I consider increased taxation to meet needs in these areas a vital investment in the future of my children and my grandchildren to come.

Sandra H. Wright

Westminster

School Costs

Several of the candidates for the Carroll County Board of Education have indicated that they are for the new "Exit Outcomes" and also for reducing class size.

They cannot have it both ways. The two are mutually exclusive. Reducing class size involves two of the most expensive items on the Board of Education's shopping list -- building schools or leasing extra space and hiring more teachers. To make even the smallest dent in the teacher/pupil ratio would require an enormous amount of money, and spending for "Exit Outcome" curriculum rewriting would have to be cut off entirely. Reducing class size is far more important than the implementation of "Exit Outcomes."

Evelyn E. Butler

Westminster

A Farmer's Future

Re: the editorial, "Kiss and Cut" (July 5). I know I can never get you or others in your position to understand.

The farm life cannot be understood by urban or other dwellers. After a lifetime of hard work and scrimping by and only having some farm land to live off of, it is devastating to see it all lost.

The only "retirement income" I and other farmers have is the land we worked all our life for and had to purchase to make a living.

Yet year by year, our land has been devalued by zoning and other restrictions to be worth much less than it would be on the free market.

It is very disgusting to see officials who have never contributed one cent or one minute of labor on our farm yet can enforce laws and ordinances that control our future.

If, when you retire, would you like to have your pension plan to say to you that it will only pay you 25 or 30 percent of what you put into it?

Martin L. Zimmerman

Taneytown

What Trash Fight?

Have I been living somewhere else or has the Carroll County Sun? Your editorial illustration in Sunday's paper shows the two Republican candidates for State's Attorney in trash cans hurling things at one another.

This cartoon might have been accurate the last time they faced )) one another, but certainly not this time. It has been the most quiet of any campaign I have ever seen . . . almost boring.

What gives? Did you buy the artwork last election and decide you just had to use it?

Gene Edwards

Eldersburg

Reserve Company: Thanks for the Memories

I was attending annual training recently -- remember when they called it summer camp? -- and picked up the latest copy of Soldiers magazine. It contained a list of the latest unit closings announced by the Pentagon. I noticed that the 195th Maintenance Company (General Support), Westminster, was among them.

The news came as a shock to me. It's a little like combat; you know someone's going to get it, but you never think it will be you, or anyone you know well.

I knew the 195th. It was my first Army Reserve unit, joined a few years after my active duty tour ended. At that time, it was called Battery C (Searchlight), 29th Field Army Reserves, located in Carroll County.

When the Army Reserves adopted a combat support role, Battery C became the 195th Maintenance Company. This entailed a complete change of mission. People worked hard to retrain, retool and reconfigure. Our efforts were rewarded by back-to-back tours to Korea and Italy.

It was always a good unit. The field artillery days were actually nights, when we took the searchlights out and demonstrated their 1-million candle power in the hills of Indiantown Gap, Pa.

Many a Carroll countian remembers the lights from the local carnivals, where we used them to support county events and, perhaps, to help us recruit. This was not always easy in the mid-1970s, when Vietnam was still a vivid memory. Reservists weren't heroes then, and Desert Storm was a long way off.

But the 29th, followed by the 195th, continued to serve. It was a very good unit, much like the Civil War militia units that once trooped through Carroll County on the way to Gettysburg.

Like their predecessors, most unit members lived and worked in and around the county. And, like the old militia units, everyone knew everyone else. If activated in Desert Storm, the town would have gone together.

We were car dealers, postal officials, state and local policemen and telephone company employees. We were lawyers, farmers, local businessmen and high school teachers. Later, after the field artillery days, we were mothers and housewives, working women and daughters. We were, in perhaps the truest sense, Carroll County itself.

Like any small, closely knit group, we had our triumphs and tragedies.

I remember unit-sponsored Christmas dinners, and small children and babies, now grown. And Lions Club dances with all-you-can eat crabs and country bands. (We were invited by unit members who helped a young man and his wife to become part of the local community.)

I remember the fine work the unit did in Ft. Sill, Okla., where we instructed the regulars in the finer points of searchlight operations. Our competence was demonstrated again in Korea, and later in Italy as a maintenance unit. We were what the Army said Reserve units should be.

I recall the toughest first sergeant in the Army Reserve, who lost his final battle to cancer. My daughter and his granddaughter were friends.

And a young cook, recruited as a wild teen-ager, who became a fine soldier until an automobile accident carried him away.

And a good friend, who got married in the Reserve Center to another member of the unit and later died -- also too young -- of a heart attack. And others. As the years wore on, it seemed, too many others. We lived through sickness, strokes and death as the years passed by. But the unit survived.

Until now. Reserve magazine says so, in small letters; one unit in a crowd of many that are going away. Perhaps they have their mourners, too.

My memories of this unit -- this group of people -- swirl about me, conjuring up images of friends, associates, fellow soldiers, fellow Carroll countians.

My own path since then has taken me many miles from the county, and my tenure with the unit -- my first -- is a far memory as I approach the end of my own Reserve career.

But I can never forget. Not the unit, nor the people, nor what all of this meant to many of us.

So, for the final time -- and without apology in a cynical age -- I deliver a silent salute to the 195th and its members. And, perhaps, to a simpler era, made all the more poignant through the passage of time and experience.

It served you well, Carroll County, in more ways than you can remember.

Robert T. Raffel

Orlando, Fla.