Schools

One day after attending an April 24 White House summit on preventing faith-based schools from closing in the inner-city, Dr. Ronald J. Valenti, Baltimore superintendent of Catholic schools, welcomed a renewed proposal from President George W. Bush to establish a “Pell Grant for Kids.”

“I was glad to be at a Catholic school where Christ was at the center,” he said. “The students were incredibly resilient. It was really clear that their faith in Christ was the foundation for everything.”

Ever since Matt passed his flight test and became Maryland’s youngest hot air balloon pilot on August 24, the nascent aviator has been on cloud nine. Floating on the winds is all he’s wanted to do since he took his first ride at age 6 when his father put him in a hot air balloon at the annual Preakness celebration.

These days, it takes less than five minutes to log onto the Internet and download whole papers complete with footnotes and bibliographies. Several Web sites offer such a “service” for free or a small fee, posting hundreds of papers on topics ranging from American literature to Shakespeare to world history.