Around Maryland

The Baltimore Police deputy commissioner overseeing the department’s consent decree with the federal government will leave the agency at the end of September, he announced Wednesday. Eric Melancon, who leads the agency’s Compliance Bureau, said he will return to New Orleans to be closer to his family and to pursue a new career opportunity. He did not specify what the job was.

Howard County Public Schools is adjusting school start times in order to adapt to ongoing school bus issues. In a letter to families, HCPSS Superintendent Michael Martirano said that thousands of students are experiencing delays and some students are even being dropped off nearly two hours after dismissal. The school bus problems began during the first day of school.

Raychel Santo was both a Johns Hopkins University alumnus and employee in 2018 when she decided to tackle the inequity she saw in her employer’s free shuttle system. It “weighed on her” that the free shuttle wasn’t convenient for a lot of Santo’s coworkers, many of whom would pay for transit that brought them to the North Baltimore campus from less-connected, more remote parts of the city.

Hundreds of people gathered outside the Frederick County Board of Education meeting on Wednesday during a pair of passionate — and at times tense — demonstrations related to the district’s gender identity policies. Local groups opposing the board’s Policy 443 — which, among other things, directs school employees to use students’ preferred names and pronouns, and says school employees will keep a student’s gender identity private, not disclosing it to the student’s parents or guardians, unless the child consents to sharing it — advertised the event as a “rally for parents’ rights.”

A ban on broadcasting court audio recordings in Maryland will end Jan. 1, after the state’s highest court approved new rules regarding the release of court recordings. The Maryland Supreme Court approved the change during a meeting Tuesday. The Daily Record reports that starting next year, the public will be able to obtain copies of audio recordings and disseminate or broadcast them, though the recordings will first be subject to a redaction process to shield sensitive information.

Montgomery County developers and realtors are concerned the rent stabilization bill (Bill 15-23) passed by the County Council in July could deter new multifamily development, reduce rental housing stock and have the opposite effect lawmakers sought. The impact the new legislation – which City Council officials say will start being enforced in late Spring 2024 – will have on development in the county ­is largely unknown.

Carroll County Public Schools can’t keep up with a flood of requests to review 56 school library books by a group of parents who oppose their content, so the superintendent has temporarily taken them off the shelves. Flooding the queue is the conservative parents-rights group Moms for Liberty, whose Carroll County chapter has joined its nationwide call for stricter school library book selection, targeting titles with sexual content, in particular.