Around Maryland

The Frederick County Council is considering a bill that would raise the taxes some county residents pay for street lighting in their neighborhoods. According to County Budget Director Kelly Weaver, the county has three electric lighting districts — one in Braddock Heights, one in Libertytown and another just outside the Brunswick town limits. During a meeting on Tuesday, Weaver told the council that the electric lighting districts were created by groups of residents who wanted street lights installed in their neighborhoods, but had no homeowners’ association to carry out the task.

An ambitious plan to transform the Harbour House and Eastport Terrace public housing communities in Annapolis has cleared an important hurdle. The city and the housing authority announced in a news release this week that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development had approved their detailed redevelopment plan. The Choice Neighborhoods Planning Grant Initiative leverages public and private funds to support and create locally driven strategies to help transform struggling neighborhoods with public or HUD-assisted housing, according to the CNI website.

West Baltimore is on the brink of opening a new multi-million dollar community space. The plan is to restore the historical Public School 103 on Division Street, which served as Thurgood Marshall's elementary school. The building has sat vacant in the Upton community for decades. Come this summer, its new life will begin as the Thurgood Marshall Amenity Center. "I have my historic consultants there," said Dr. Alvin Hathaway.

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.