Farmers Markets this weekend: Clarksville Commons and Old Ellicott City today, Oakland Mills tomorrow. Pollen and humidity will be high and yet my weather app says air quality will be excellent for outdoor activities. Go figure. There’s a cool new activity getting up and running over at the at the Nonprofit Collaborative of Howard County today. You can help Bridges to Housing Stability turn their shredded paper waste into new paper that will be donated to participating HCPSS art classrooms. I’m fascinated by this. Organizations shred documents which contain confidential information. That’s a responsible thing to do. But the resulting shreds can’t be put in our regular paper recycling process. Now what? By creating Waste to Wonder, Bridges to Housing Stability aims to: dispose of confidential paper waste responsibly, turn it into a usable resource for classrooms, and - - probably the most significant, to my mind - - connect with new community members who may not know about t...
At the risk of dating myself: the year is 1975. I’m ducking into the girls’ room across from my ten o’clock algebra class. It’s filled with girls. And cigarette smoke. Smoking at school was allowed in those days - - outside. Of course it didn’t just stay outside. I hated it. I hated the smell of the smoke which clung to my clothes and made it hard for me to breathe. I hated competing for the few stalls available when at least one contained someone standing on the toilet seat and burning a message into the ceiling tile with their lit cigarette. It never ceased being a hostile environment to me. By my senior year they had started locking many of the student restrooms. By that time I had figured out which of the faculty bathrooms I could slip without being caught. All this is to say that if anyone tells you that kids today are so much worse than back in the day…Are they? Howard County schools can’t keep up with bathroom vandalism. Their solution? Lock them , ...