NATIONAL NIGHT OUT Rockville, Olney focus on public safety Tuesday. A-3
The Gazette
A&E: Unexpected Stage tackles youth cancer in musical “Dani Girl.” A-12
ROCKVILLE | ASPEN HILL | NORTH POTOMAC | OLNEY DA I LY U P DAT E S AT G A Z E T T E . N E T
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Rockville man is honored for his historical work with schoolhouse n
Family, Aspen Hill community keep memory of homicide victim alive n
PEGGY MCEWAN STAFF WRITER
Ralph Buglass has turned his passion for history into an award-winning hobby as volunteer schoolmaster at Kingsley School, a one-room schoolhouse in Little Bennett Regional Park in Clarksburg. The 60-year-old Rockville man was awarded the Agency Volunteer Award at the Maryland Recreation and Parks Association conference in Ocean City in April and was one of three people nationwide to receive the 2014 Country Schools Association of America Service Award, presented in St. Joseph, Mo., in June. Kingsley School was boarded up and unused when Buglass first saw it while hiking about four years ago. “We walked right by the schoolhouse and I thought, ‘Wow, what a gem,’” he said. Later, on another hike, this one in Black Hill Regional Park in Boyds, he said he saw a sign seeking park volunteers and one of the offerings was to help at the Kingsley School. Buglass signed up and has worked with Montgomery Parks and the Clarksburg Historical Society to get the schoolhouse furnished as it would have been from 1893 to 1935, when it accommodated students in grades one through seven, mostly from neighboring farms. He also expanded the time the school is open to the public. It is now open from 1 to 4 p.m. the first Sunday of the
BY
DAN GROSS/THE GAZETTE
Ralph Buglass of Rockville watches as Emma Poch, 8, of Germantown carefully lowers the needle onto a record while Kari Goldin, 9, of Chevy Chase and Kathryn Crane, 10, of Gaithersburg await their turn. The hand-cranked phonograph was used to play music as the children would enter the one-room Kingsley School in Clarksburg. month from April to November, and to school, camp and Scout groups by arrangement. This month, Buglass hosted three camp groups, a nature camp, an archaeology camp and an American Girl camp at the schoolhouse. It also is open every year for Clarksburg Days, usually held on a Saturday in September, Buglass said. During the three years Buglass has volunteered at Kingsley, he said, he has become even more interested in the history
High school field in Rockville at center of lawsuit BY
RYAN MARSHALL STAFF WRITER
Montgomery County’s oneroom schoolhouses. “If you count one- and tworoom schoolhouses, there are five [left] in the county,” he said. “If you want to start counting schools that have been converted to other uses or are falling down, there are up to 25. Some of them are hardly recognizable.” Buglass, who is retired after a career in publication production, said he spends about 10 hours per week on his school-
house work, counting time at Kingsley and time conducting research. He said the most interesting part of his research has been learning the history of segregated schools in Montgomery County. Buglass said he hopes to present a talk on the history of education in Montgomery County at next year’s Country Schools Association of America conference. pmcewan@gazette.net
Turf battle emerges among soccer groups n
25 cents
Mom: ‘I’ve let my daughter down’
A learning experience for all BY
SPORTS: Fourth coach in four years takes over Bullis’ girls basketball team. B-1
LINDSAY A. POWERS STAFF WRITER
A Montgomery County youth soccer organization is suing the county’s school board, claiming the board unfairly struck agreements with other groups for the use of two artificial turf fields at schools. Montgomery Soccer Inc. filed the suit July 1 in Montgomery County Circuit Court. In a July 22 letter to the County Coun-
cil, the group’s executive director, Doug Schuessler, said the school board decided which organizations would use the turf fields at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville and Winston Churchill High School in Potomac “through a flawed and unlawful process.” The board, the letter said, did not consider the different submissions but rather approved a recommendation and did not share how the submissions were evaluated based on a point system. In addition to the lawsuit, the organization appealed to the state Board of Education, according to the letter.
After 39 years, Pat Haberman still has nightmares about the night her daughter didn’t come home. On July 24, 1975, Kathy Beatty, 15, left a note for her mother she was going to a party down the street Beatty and left her Aspen Hill home. When Haberman got home, she found the note and assumed Kathy hadn’t come home because of a strong thunderstorm that had moved through the area that night. But when she went to the house where the party had been, people there told her Kathy never showed up. The case started out as a missing persons report, as police searched for Kathy through the night, said Frank Colbert, a detective with the Montgomery County Police Department’s Major Crime Division’s cold case unit, who’s handling the case. The next morning, Kathy’s sister and a friend found her in a wooded area known as “The Rocks,” next to a Kmart store near the intersection of Connecticut and Georgia avenues,
he said. Badly beaten and with signs of having been sexually assaulted, Kathy was taken to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, where she died within two weeks, on Aug. 5. Detectives initially thought they had a firm grasp on the case with solid suspects, but their investigation didn’t pan out. “It [was] worked pretty hard, from what I can tell,” Colbert said. The wooded area where Kathy was found was a common hangout for kids, Colbert said. The area had a reputation as a place where local kids would go to drink and do other drugs. It also had a network of trails, where locals would ride their dirt bikes. Kathy had a crush on a boy in her class who owned a dirt bike, and the pretty redhead would go to the area to hang around and try to get him to notice her, her mother said. On Friday night, Kathy’s family and friends returned for a vigil in the Kmart parking lot to remember her on the 39th anniversary of the attack and to bring attention to the case in hopes of finding her killer. The fact that no one has been brought to justice haunts her, Haberman said. “I feel like I’ve let my daughter down,” she said Friday. Friends looked back fondly on Kathy, and reflected on the impact the killing had on the community. “Kathy was the sweetest
See COLD, Page A-8 “We owe this to Kathy,” says Pat Haberman, remembering her daughter Kathy Beatty, who was killed in 1975, during a vigil Friday night near where she was attacked in Aspen Hill.
The Bethesda Soccer Club was awarded the use of the Richard Montgomery field and Bethesda Lacrosse and the Potomac Soccer Association were awarded the use of the Churchill field. The school board recently awarded Montgomery Soccer the field-use agreement for Gaithersburg High School’s field. Schuessler said in an interview he thinks his group should have been awarded the Richard Montgomery and Churchill field agreements because it serves a broader group of players around
BILL RYAN/THE GAZETTE
See TURF, Page A-8
Chinese students learn, serve at Good Counsel summer program East meets West in Olney n
BY
TERRI HOGAN STAFF WRITER
A group of 38 Chinese students will have a lot to say when they return to school and are asked how they spent their sum-
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mer vacation. The middle-school students from Shenzhen Foreign Language School in the Longgang District spent two weeks with host families in the Olney area, while participating in a summer camp program at Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Olney. The students studied English
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for half of the day and participated in camp activities the other half. Xianhua Xia, 12, whose American name is Shirley, said she liked the program, calling it very different from Chinese school life. “Every day we go out and play, but in China there are more lessons,” she said.
NURSERY SHUTTERED Citing higher rents, Behnke closes popular location on River Road in Potomac after 16 years.
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Hao Lan, 12, or Darth, agreed, adding that there’s less homework here than what he’s used to in China. Shirley said her favorite activity was making sandwiches for the poor, because in China that would be something done within a family, not at school. She also enjoyed eating tuna sandwiches and shopping, especially at Five
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Below. “America is really great,” she said. “I am going to work hard to get my degree and come back here, hopefully.” Darth liked playing soccer, visiting the Agricultural History Farm Park, eating pizza and cookies provided by a nursing home they visited, and American toys.
“I went to several toy stores and was amazed at how big they were,” he said. “And the pizza and cookies were delicious.” Teachers Rose Fang and Kingsley Liu, who accompanied the group from China, said they were surprised by the importance of athletics in U.S. schools. The
See STUDENTS, Page A-8