A 12-year-old girl at a Baltimore middle school has reported that a teenage boy sexually assaulted her in a classroom last month, according to city police. The story was first reported on Fox-45 TV.

Police said the girl told detectives that she was attacked about 12:15 p.m. on Oct. 4 inside Harlem Park Elementary/Middle School, but did not report the incident to police until two weeks later. The school is located in the 1400 block of West Lafayette Ave. in Sandtown-Winchester.

Det. Jeremy Silbert, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, said the case is under investigation and no charges have been filed against the 13-year-old suspect. He said detectives are trying to determine whether the girl was raped or sexually assaulted.

The mother told television news stations that she was upset that the boy remains in school; officials said the investigation is ongoing. "I had to remove my daughter from out of class, and he can walk around the school Scott free," the mother told WBAL-TV.

Meanwhile, the school system has installed metal detectors at Baltimore Civitas School after a stabbing a week ago, WBAL radio reports. 

Posted by Peter Hermann at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Schools, West Baltimore
        

Students at Digital Harbor High School want to make a change in Baltimore.

Melissa McDonald's freshman English class spent months researching the causes of violence and discussing solutions, and on Wednesday morning held a peace summit called "Let Us Make a Change" attended by guests that included schools CEO Andres Alonso, State's Attorney Gregg Bernstein, and their peers.

"Our solutions may not be the best, but we know from our experiences that they will help," said student Doneshia Duppins.

Among their proposals: anger management, tutoring, summer sports leagues and - a trip to Six Flags. Hey, it's worth a shot. They filmed "public service announcements" to make their case.

"You can expand who you are by expanding what you know," one student said in a video pitch for expanded tutoring programs.

At one point in the assembly, Philip J. Leaf, of the Johns Hopkins Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, asked those in the auditorium to stand up if they had lost a relative or friend to violence. More than a quarter of the students stood up.

Continue reading "City students hold peace event" »

Posted by Justin Fenton at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Schools, South Baltimore
        

A 40-year-old Baltimore County woman has been indicted on charges that she billed the city school system for more than $100,000 in tutoring services that she never provided, the state prosecutor's office announced.

Continue reading "Tutor charged with stealing $100k from city school system meant for special education students" »

Posted by Justin Fenton at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Schools
        

City police said a 44-year-old man who was beaten last month at a light rail stop has died from his injuries, while the agency released the identities of several recent homicide victims.

Police said that on Oct. 22, Winslow Thomas walked to a home in the 2200 block of Sidney Ave. and said he had been assaulted at the Westport light rail station in the 2200 block of Kloman St. He was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma center where he was treated for cuts and blunt force injuries and was pronounced dead Wednesday at 9:15 p.m.

Three recent victims of killings this week were also identified.

Police said Jerry Harden, 21, was the man found inside a burning home in the 7000 block of McClean Blvd. in Northeast Baltimore. Harden had been stabbed in the chest prior to the fire being set, an autopsy determined.

Harden is the second person killed this year at the apartment complex, which is near Parkville. Darius Ray, a 20-year-old Marine, was stabbed at a party there in January. A 30-year-old man was also fatally shot nearby in July.

Kevin Anderson, 30, was the man found dead on a sidewalk in the 200 block of S. Woodyear St. just before 3 a.m. Thursday. He was shot in the back and died at shock trauma. The incident happened in the Mt. Clare neighborhood and occurred in the department's Southern District.

Police also identified Malcolm Hill, 53, as the man found shot to death on the front porch of a home in the 2500 block of Robb St. of the Coldstream Homestead Montebello neighborhood where he lived. Police did not provide motives or descriptions of suspects for any of the killings.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Northeast Baltimore, Schools, South Baltimore
        

Theresa Waddell will never forget the bright boy with troubled eyes who sat in her kindergarten class during her first year as a teacher. She drilled home the message that he could grow to become anything he wanted.

He would grow to murder her son.

On Monday, Waddell, 59, will stand before a kindergarten class for the first time since her son was killed.

Read more from The Sun's city schools reporter Erica Green here.

[Photo by Sun photographer Kenneth K. Lam]

Posted by Justin Fenton at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Schools
        

A new study by the Abell Foundation links bad diets to bad behavior.

As reported by The Baltimore Sun's Meredith Cohn today, some public health experts are urging supplying children with vitamins and other nutritional supplements to increase learning and curb violence:

If it's proven that a tablet a day can tick up test scores and dial down violence, it could be a cheaper and easier means of improving a lot of young lives than costly and labor-intensive treatments, according to the Abell Foundation, which wants to determine whether a Baltimore study would be worthwhile.

"We wanted to see what the scientific view was at this point in time," said Robert C. Embry Jr., foundation president. "It seemed like there was something there worth exploring."

Embry passed the latest data on the issue to the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, where a team will be assembled in the fall to consider the scientific studies and the outlines of a possible study, perhaps in city schools.

Here is the report:

Continue reading "Bad diet can lead to bad behavior and crime, study shows" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Confronting crime, Schools
        

A quick update: On March 5, an 8-year-old was arrested after being caught with a loaded handgun at a South Baltimore elementary school. The Sun subsequently reported that schools police had delayed notifying city police of the incident, setting their investigation back by not promptly being able to search the child's home or begin tracing the weapon. The episode revealed mistrusts and misgivings by the department over how the incident was treated.

More than a month later, the child's juvenile charges are moving forward, but school and city police say they were unable to trace the gun and no adults will face criminal charges in connection with the incident. City police said they were only responsible for tracking the gun, and referred additional questions to schools police. A city schools spokeswoman said the schools police had handed off the case to juvenile services and would not be involved in the case until it came to court.

As for what's going on with the juvenile proceedings and any possible social services action, all of that is secret in Maryland.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 2:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: Schools, South Baltimore
        

Even as the city school police was sending out a statement lauding how well its force works with the Baltimore Police Department, a school spokeswoman was admitting that her department deliberately withheld information from the city force.

What kind of information? That school police had arrested an 8-year-old boy with a gun at Sharp Leadenhall Elementary School. That was on Thursday. Baltimore police didn't learn of the arrest until Friday.

And since it's Baltimore police tasked with researching the .380 caliber handgun and finding out how the kid got the gun, and whether any adults need to go to jail, that delay was costly. Detectives didn't even get to the 3rd-grader's house in North Baltimore until 28 hours after the arrest. By then, a search was all but useless.

Law enforcement agencies love to talk about how closely they work together, how they partner with each other, but in this case, when it really mattered, all that went out the window. What was especially suprising is that the school system told me they didn't tell city police on purpose.

Their rational: the suspect was just 8-years-old, and in a special needs school. So school officials talked to state juvenile services and to prosecutors about how to proceed. Meanwhile, the valuable time was being lost in figuring out how someone so young could come to an elementary school packing a loaded gun in his book bag.

Here is a statement from the Baltimore school system on how they handled this case:

Continue reading "School police kept city cops in the dark over gun" »

Posted by Peter Hermann at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Confronting crime, Schools
        

UPDATE, 11:40 p.m.: The city schools system just released a statement, confirming that a third-grader at Sharp Leadenhall Elementary was arrested Thursday for possession of a loaded .380 caliber handgun. School staff determined that the student was acting suspiciously and began closely monitoring the student's behavior, eventually searching his backpack and contacting school police to retrieve the weapon. The student was arrested and transported to the Department of Juvenile Services.

Schools and city police are conducting an investigation to determine the gun owner and the purchase origin of the weapon before determining if charges should be filed against others that may have contributed to the student coming into possession of the handgun.

In addition to being arrested, school officials said the student may face "extended suspension" or expulsion following "due process."

Sharp-Leadenhall Elementary has been described as a school attended exclusively by special education students. As of the 2008-2009 school year, it had just 66 students enrolled.

Continue reading "8-year-old arrested for bringing loaded gun to school" »

Posted by Justin Fenton at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (50)
Categories: Schools
        

A former city police officer is due in court this week after being charged last month with posing as an undercover officer at a Southwest Baltimore high school.

School police say 26-year-old Pierre Dorsey, of the 4400 block of Shamrock Ave., told an officer he was working for the principal of Edmondson High School on an undercover detail to investigate illegal activities occurring in the school and crimes that involved students at nearby Edmondson Village Shopping Center.

But Dorsey said he did not have any identification, and the principal said that she had not asked Dorsey to conduct any observation, according to records. She believed he had been assigned there by the Police Department. When she approached him, he had flashed a yellow Baltimore City license and said  he was not required to carry a badge in his undercover capacity, records show.

Posted by Justin Fenton at 6:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Schools