Dr. Elizabeth Clayborne is beating the odds. Since she started fundraising in 2021, Clayborne said she’s raised $3.25 million for her medical device company, NasaClip. As a biracial Black woman, the numbers aren’t necessarily always on Clayborne’s side — in 2021, startups founded by Black women received just 0.34% of venture capital funds nationally — but she wants to be more than the exception.

Senior living homes across Maryland are making efforts to go green. A 2022 study found that seniors in wealthy countries were on track to become the highest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions as compared to other age groups. The study found that in countries like the U.S. where many seniors live in older single-family homes, consumption of energy increases. But there are ways to mitigate that, and many senior communities in Maryland are taking steps to become more sustainable and climate-friendly.

 

Tucked into an unassuming corner in southwestern Columbia sits a historic Black church with roots dating back before the Civil War, including connections to the Underground Railroad. Now after receiving $233,500 in state funding, the 150-person congregation is hoping it will be better able to preserve that history. Marion Esterling, the pastor of Locust United Methodist Church, said that he felt humbled to be one of 24 Maryland groups to get the funding and that the congregation looked forward to using it to carry on the church’s legacy “for another 155 years.”

If you read a book about Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, you might learn about the emergence of ebooks and disruptions during the beginning of the pandemic. But there’s one plot twist you might not see coming — book checkouts are way up. The library system set a 12-year high with 1.9 million first-time borrows, the equivalent of about 3.4 per resident, based on census estimates. The count reflects all checkouts of physical books, excluding renewals.

For the men’s and women’s basketball players and coaches participating in this week’s Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association Tournament in Baltimore, the six-day event is the culmination of a year-long quest to capture a coveted prize that includes an automatic entry into the NCAA Division II postseason. For the pep band members and directors who will also descend upon CFG Bank Arena, there’s a loftier comparison.

Legislation to arm school police officers in Baltimore City is once again up for debate. Officers with Baltimore City Schools Police have the same powers as city police officers on the beat, but one thing is noticeably missing: They’re unarmed. Baltimore City is the only jurisdiction in the state that currently prohibits school police officers from carrying their firearms inside schools. State Sen. J.B. Jennings, R-District 7, who represents portions of Baltimore and Harford counties, re-introduced legislation (Senate Bill 819) in Session 2024 to require city school police officers to carry a firearm while on assignment on school property.

Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world. That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data.

Speaking to lawmakers on a budgetary subcommittee, Ibukun Jegede laid out the stakes of the Maryland prison staffing shortages in stark terms. “In the yard, we’re supposed to have nine officers when recreation is going on, but we barely have two, watching over 200 incarcerated individuals,” Jegede, a correctional sergeant at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, said last week in Annapolis.

Federal and state regulators are suing to block a national grocery chain merger that would sell 10 Harris Teeter stores in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., to the company behind the Piggly Wiggly franchise. The Federal Trade Commission, along with nine states including Maryland, on Monday filed a lawsuit challenging Kroger Co.’s $24.6 billion bid to purchase Albertsons Companies Inc., alleging the merger would reduce competition and lead to higher prices for millions of Americans.

For the past several years, Maryland schools have been anticipating a tsunami of new state and local money to wash over them, allowing them to add prekindergarten, raise teacher salaries and create support for high-poverty schools. The reality is now here, and instead of euphoria, there’s shock, even from some educators who are deep in the weeds of the landmark education reform legislation.