Ron Cassie, The Examiner
2007-03-23 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Chanting “No education, no life,” more than 100 city students from more than a dozen Baltimore high schools demonstrated at a “die-in” in front of Baltimore City public school headquarters Thursday morning.

Falling to the concrete amid recorded “screams” while creating a pseudo crime scene — complete with yellow police tape and chalk-outlined bodies on the North Avenue sidewalk — the students drew a compelling connection between education and crime in the city.

“We have the second-highest murder rate in the country,” said Amani Love, a ConneXions Leadership Academy ninth-grader. “Where I live, so many people can’t read, can’t do math and really aren’t qualified to do anything. With no education, they can’t expect to get a decent job. What else are people supposed to do, but fall down in this system? That’s why we have the second-highest murder rate in the country.”

Organized by Baltimore’s Algebra Project, the students continued their ongoing demand for $1.08 billion they say the school system is owed based on Judge Joseph Kaplan’s rulings in Bradford v. Maryland State Board of Education over the past 10 years. The students said that as mayor the recently-elected Gov. Martin O’Malley committed to fulfilling Kaplan’s decision, but now in Annapolis has backed off that pledge.

Student leaders Chris Goodman, a City College high school graduate now at the University of Maryland; Fernandes Harlee, a New Era Academy senior; Ryan Mason, a Mergenthaler Vo-Tech senior, and city schools Algebra Project facilitator Jay Gillen all said they were promised at least five school buses at a March 13 meeting with school board Chairman Brian Morris, commissioner George Van Hook and board executive Janet Johnson for a lobby day/field trip in Annapolis on Thursday.

Morris said by phone yesterday, however, that board members had simply told the students they “supported” them, but that they would have to go through the school system’s interim CEO, Charlene Cooper Boston, for field trip approval.

On March 15, students said they documented more than 800 students planning to go to Annapolis March 22. They said they were told on March 16 that the board would not supply the buses because Boston had turned down their request for the field trip.

Vanessa Pyatt, a school system spokeswoman, said the students did not file necessary paperwork outlining the field trip’s guidelines and explaining its educational relevance.

“They gave us a bureacratic run around,” Mason said. “We show up here because we wanted a chance to meet the governor, the former mayor who knows the city school’s problems and that we’ve been unlawfully underfunded according to Judge Kaplan. I just think they didn’t want all these young male and female black students getting on buses to do something positive. But we’re not going to back down.”

rcassie@baltimoreexaminer.com