Dundalk's New School Year Opens with Many Changes

When Dundalk-area children return to school today, they will return to considerable changes.

Eastwood Elementary Magnet School, a vibrant, exciting, successful school with an engaged community just two months ago, now sits closed and forlorn.

Its doors will not welcome another group of students to a new school year.

Across town a bit, the gleaming new Dundalk High and Sollers Point Technical High schools will open their doors to students for the first time.

The $79 million project on Delvale Avenue replaces the aging Dundalk High School—now being demolished—on the same campus, and the old Sollers Point building on Sollers Point Road.

Holabird Middle School and Norwood Elementary schools open with new identities—at the expense of Eastwood Elementary.

Baltimore County Public Schools officials closed Eastwood and merged its student population with Norwood and Holabird to create a pre-K to grade 8 science, technology, engineering and mathematics academy.

In all of Greater Dundalk's schools, teachers and staff members will start a new school year with nothing but hope and expectations for success for their charges over the coming year, and students will arrive in their new classrooms with a clean slate and the opportunity to control their own academic destinies.

But with all that said, I'll bet a whole bunch of people—faculty members and students alike—go home at the end of the first day of school with just one thought: "Only 179 days left till summer vacation."