Around Maryland

In honor of the upcoming Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott teamed up with local and national organizations to launch the “Campaign for Citywide Service,” a three-year, $30 million campaign aimed at creating full-time service opportunities for thousands in Baltimore City. The administration is partnering with the Baltimore City Council and Baltimore Corps, an organization striving to build a more equitable Baltimore, with the goal of elevating the city as a national leader in community service, Mayor Scott’s office said.

Nearly 500 people need to retest for COVID-19 after tests they took Monday at Ripken Stadium at Aberdeen didn’t make it to the lab in time and expired. A spokesperson for the Harford County Health Department told WJZ its primary laboratory, run by Omnipoynt Solutions, experienced a COVID-19 outbreak this week and had to shut down. Approximately 471 salivas samples from Monday, Jan. 10 were rerouted to a backup laboratory, but expired before they could be processed, the department explained.

School system leaders in Montgomery County are planning to move more schools with high coronavirus infection rates into virtual learning in coming days, as the number of students and staff testing positive climbs amid the surge of the omicron variant. The update late Friday afternoon came as another difficult week ended in Maryland’s largest school system, which faced mounting pressure to its rethink plans for full-scale in-person education.

As a school bus driver, Ed Martin is responsible for scores of children, as well as people in other vehicles on the road, and he works to keep everyone safe. While most of his passengers are well behaved, some cause problems that threaten the welfare of all. By writing “referrals,” Martin has reported the issues to school officials several times, but his concerns have rarely been acknowledged, he told the Allegany County Public Schools Board of Education this week.

Steptoe & Johnson LLP has released a report over 500 pages to try and explain why the Baltimore police department’s infamous Gun Trace Task Force caused such a hotbed of corruption over two decades. The report compiled by a consultant from Washington, D.C., concludes that among other things, members of the task force had no respect for the chain of command, and went unsupervised because many of them had connections to high-ranking officers within the department.

A mobile vendor accused of mishandling hundreds of COVID-19 vaccine doses delivered a majority of the suspect shots at public clinics at a state park, courthouses, grocery stores and other community settings, according to a Baltimore Sun data analysis. TrueCare24, the San Francisco-based company, is the subject of a complaint filed last month by a Maryland Department of Health employee accusing the company of improperly storing and handling vaccines and not providing required records, potentially affecting the vaccines’ efficacy.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced new measures Thursday to help assist with rising COVID-19 cases including new testing sites, nursing home measures and a free mask program. As part of the 20 new hospital-adjacent testing sites across the state, six new sites were announced, during the news conference held at University of Maryland Shore Regional Health in Easton.