Around Maryland

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.”

The police department in Montgomery County, Maryland, has lost 194 officers over the past five years and now has a sworn vacancy rate of 14%. An analysis shows recent recruit classes have averaged 23 recruits each, “which remains too low to address current attrition,” according to the memorandum submitted to a county council committee Monday.

State health officials have placed their bid for Maryland to be among the first participants in a federal program that will help fund state initiatives to improve patient outcomes and bridge inequities, while constraining hospital and medical costs. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is rolling out the new States Advancing All-Payer Health Equity Approaches and Development Model, called the AHEAD Model, and states are invited to apply for funding.

The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit digital news publication that launched in 2022, is planning to expand its editorial coverage beyond Maryland's biggest city into the surrounding regions and beyond, its new CEO Bob Cohn told Axios. Why it matters: Cohn sees a geographical expansion and more editorial investments in niche subject areas, like business, culture and tech, as key drivers for adding more digital subscribers.