Around Maryland

A small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore has suspended its entire police force pending the results of an investigation by state prosecutors, a largely unexplained decision that has left residents shocked, skeptical and on edge. The unusually harsh crackdown on law enforcement in Ridgely suggests that even some of the country’s most rural communities are feeling the effects of the national reckoning on policing that unfolded in the wake of George Floyd’s killing.

Chaotic classrooms, cramped cafeterias and multiple assemblies to accommodate droves of students could become a thing of the past for Hampton Elementary School. vParents spent years advocating for change for their beloved but overcrowded Timonium school. Their calls for help led to what Baltimore County school officials have called their largest-ever redistricting process.

Local school systems have less than four months to begin meeting new financial reporting requirements to ensure public school students receive the resources for a quality education, under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan. The Blueprint’s Accountability and Implementation Board (AIB), which oversees the 10-year $3.8 billion plan, approved a policy Thursday that would require officials from all 24 school systems to ensure at least 75% of per pupil funding follows that person to the school attended.

A federal judge Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a coalition of environmental and preservation groups seeking to block a proposed expansion of the Capital Beltway and Interstate 270. U.S District Court Senior Judge Deborah K. Chasanow rejected a request for summary judgment sought by the Maryland Chapter of the Sierra Club, Friends of Moses Hall, National Resources Defense Council, and the Northern Virginia Citizens Association.

More mobile crisis outreach teams, or MCOTs, are getting ready to roll in Montgomery County, Maryland. The teams, generally consisting of a licensed clinician and a peer support specialist, operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.bCurrently, there are three MCOTs operating across the county — and a grant to add two more teams has been secured.

The Kahlert Foundation is granting $2.5 million to the Carroll Hospital Foundation for the purchase of a linear accelerator for the William E. Kahlert Regional Cancer Center at Carroll Hospital, a device that aims radiation at cancer tumors and spares nearby healthy tissue. David Perry, M.D., chair of radiation oncology for LifeBridge Health, said he is encouraged by the benefits the technology will bring to the hospital’s patients, adding there have been huge advancements in radiation technology since the installation of the hospital’s original linear accelerator 10 years ago.

The upcoming inaugural season of the Hagerstown Flying Boxcars seemed a little more real Wednesday as two of the team’s owners, Linda Ebersole and Howard “Blackie” Bowen, secured preliminary approval for a temporary license to sell alcohol at the new stadium under construction downtown. They’ve formed a partnership, Hub City Concessions LLC, to sell refreshments at the stadium.

A decade-old Maryland law requiring would-be handgun owners to submit their fingerprints and undergo four hours of safety training is under fire in federal court, part of a broader national push to curtail gun control measures. Maryland Shall Issue, a pro-firearms group, and Atlantic Guns, a Montgomery County gun shop, called the state’s Handgun Qualification License program “peculiar and onerous” in court papers, and claimed that it infringes upon law-abiding citizens’ right to keep and bear arms by causing undue delay.

Baltimore school principals and staff have been threatened with guns, punched in the face, pulled to the ground, kicked and stalked. Some have landed in the hospital. Others have installed cameras and more locks at home. They aren’t afraid of their students. It’s the parents they worry about. “I have never experienced so many adults that are willing to engage in their child’s conflict,” said Craig Rivers, the principal of Frederick Douglass High School in West Baltimore and a longtime city school administrator. “I have never seen it this bad.”