Around Maryland

If you read a book about Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, you might learn about the emergence of ebooks and disruptions during the beginning of the pandemic. But there’s one plot twist you might not see coming — book checkouts are way up. The library system set a 12-year high with 1.9 million first-time borrows, the equivalent of about 3.4 per resident, based on census estimates. The count reflects all checkouts of physical books, excluding renewals.

For the men’s and women’s basketball players and coaches participating in this week’s Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association Tournament in Baltimore, the six-day event is the culmination of a year-long quest to capture a coveted prize that includes an automatic entry into the NCAA Division II postseason. For the pep band members and directors who will also descend upon CFG Bank Arena, there’s a loftier comparison.

Speaking to lawmakers on a budgetary subcommittee, Ibukun Jegede laid out the stakes of the Maryland prison staffing shortages in stark terms. “In the yard, we’re supposed to have nine officers when recreation is going on, but we barely have two, watching over 200 incarcerated individuals,” Jegede, a correctional sergeant at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Jessup, said last week in Annapolis.

Planning on traveling through downtown this upcoming week? Make sure you plan ahead because traffic is expected to be much heavier due to the CIAA tournament at the CFG Bank Arena. The tournament will be held Monday, February 26 through Sunday, March 3. Games will take place at various times each day, so if you’re traveling downtown you should prepare for possible traffic congestion and delays.

Many Maryland colleges have adjusted their enrollment deadlines because of issues around delayed financial aid notifications. For affected students, the excitement of being accepted into their first-choice college is being tempered this year by a troublesome uncertainty over whether they’ll get the financial aid they need to attend. The financial aid decisions that usually go out with acceptance letters are being delayed because of a later-than-expected rollout of a revised Free Application for Federal Student Aid, the form commonly known as FAFSA that schools use to compute financial aid.

On Friday, the Baltimore City Fire Department held its first recruit graduation ceremony of the year. The department added nearly forty EMT/Firefighter and EMT/Paramedics to the ranks of the department. As many as two-hundred fifty family members, friends, colleagues and well wishers attended the graduation ceremony to offer expressions of encouragement and support the members who were graduating at the Baltimore City Fire Academy.

The Frederick Community College Board of Trustees on Wednesday voted to approve a $72.4 million draft operating budget for fiscal year 2025. The $72.4 million operating budget would be an increase of $5.6 million, or 8.4%, over fiscal year 2024. Included in the budget discussion was a proposal to increase tuition rates and scale back a planned renovation to save costs. The proposed tuition adjustment would raise costs for students by about 2%.

Excitement and cheers rang through the front lobby of the new Silver Spring Recreation and Aquatic Center on Saturday as the facility finally opened to the public nearly five years after construction on the 120,000-square-foot building began. “I have not been this excited since the Washington Nationals won the World Series,” County Councilmember Gabe Albornoz told an eager crowd during the morning’s grand opening ceremony at the center at 1315 Apple Ave. in downtown Silver Spring.