Around Maryland

Standing in front of a 40-foot electric bus, Gov. Wes Moore asked the crowd gathered inside the Kirk Street Depot to take a deep breath. The hum of an industrial fan some 50 yards away and camera shutter clicks filled the silence. “That’s the power of this progress — the fact that we are standing right in front of an active bus and we hear nothing. The fact that we’re standing right toward the tail end of an active bus, and we smell nothing,” Moore said.

Barbara Smith decided it was time. After years of attending the CIAA Basketball Tournament in Charlotte, the North Carolina native made the five-hour drive on Sunday from Durham to Baltimore. “It gets in your blood, and you can’t get it out,” Smith said the following day in her seat at CFG Bank Arena for the tournament’s opening night. As a DJ warmed up the crowd with songs by Ice Spice and Pop Smoke, Smith showed off her heather gray 25th anniversary CIAA Tournament sweatshirt as the women’s teams of Bowie State and Winston-Salem State ran up and down the court.

Clarence Crawford, president of the Maryland State Board of Education, started Tuesday’s meeting with a declaration. “Business as usual in Maryland public education is over,” he said. “It’s dead.” The state is overhauling its public education system as part of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a 10-year reform plan with billions in funding. Public school leaders are contending with significant changes to teacher salaries, literacy instruction and academic standards while figuring out how to budget for those reforms.

One of the few tall ships that still navigate the globe will sail by Fort McHenry before making a dramatic entrance and docking in the Inner Harbor next month. BAP Unión, a Peruvian naval vessel, is scheduled to arrive in Baltimore on March 2 and remain docked until March 5. The boat is scheduled to pass Fort McHenry at 9 a.m. and reach its destination and berth in the Inner Harbor at 11 a.m., according to PromPeru, the country’s tourism agency.

For Baltimore City eighth graders, there’s a rite of passage that comes around this time every year when they learn what high school they will go to in August. It’s a bit like getting college acceptance letters, but everyone gets theirs on the same day. This year, anticipation grew on Presidents Day when families checked online for the results. But when results were finally posted late in the evening, for 199 of the 5,129 students, they were, well, quite confusing. Some students had been waitlisted everywhere, or they hadn’t gotten in to schools they were pretty sure they should have.

The goal was to make it simpler and faster for prospective college students to apply for federal financial. Cue chaos. The rollout of the new 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) has been anything but simple and fast. Normally available for families to fill out by Oct. 1 of the preceding academic year, this year’s revised FAFSA was not available until the start of January 2024.

A Maryland State Highway Administration contractor has started an $8.9 million project to improve the U.S. 40 bridge decks over Interstate 70 east of Hagerstown. Weather permitting, the project is expected to be finished next year, according to a state highway release. The project involves detours while barriers are put in place and closing a lane in each direction so crews can work safely.

A bill from state Del. Kris Fair (D-3) would enable Maryland's 23 counties and the city of Baltimore to establish special tax rates for different categories of real property. Under the current state law, county jurisdictions are authorized to set a single tax rate for all real property. For fiscal year 2024, Frederick County's property tax rate was set at $1.06 per $100 of assessed value. If enacted, HB919 would grant county jurisdictions the authority to set a special tax rate of up to 12.5 cents per $100 of assessed value for six different categories of real property, including:

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.