Around Maryland

Baltimore Police officers chased a teenager in a stolen car in October through the leafy Loch Raven neighborhood, where they eventually caught him and found a beige handgun in a book bag: a Polymer80 with a 30-round magazine. The week after Thanksgiving 2022, then-18-year-old Dominique Edmonds shot and killed a man in an alley in the southwest corner of the city. When police arrested him at an apartment weeks later, they found a blue gun: also a Polymer80, this one with a 15-round magazine.

This summer, Maryland will begin training some nurses and physician assistants to perform abortions, in addition to doctors, with the goal of expanding access around the state. The $10.6 million state-funded program will be administered by the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Maryland, Baltimore. “We’re working on our curriculum right now, as well as a mobile simulation unit,” said Dr. Jessica K. Lee, associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences in the school of medicine and co-principal investigator on the training program.

Montgomery County is often described as diverse and now a new WalletHub study has placed four of the county’s largest cities in the top 10 most ethnically diverse in the United States. The City of Gaithersburg retained its title as the No. 1 most diverse city in the nation for the second year in a row, according to the study by WalletHub, an online personal finance company based in Miami. Germantown placed third, Silver Spring came in fourth and Rockville was eighth–after New York City.

As Maryland grapples with school curriculum pushback and book banning related to race and LGBTQ issues, a national analysis found that these subjects are not often discussed in K-12 schools, despite the heated debates. The Pew Research Center analysis published Thursday surveyed thousands of teachers, parents and teen students. While 68% of teachers say topics about sex and gender are rarely talked about, more than 40% of U.S. teachers say school curriculum debates about race, gender and sexuality have negatively impacted their abilities to do their job.

Twelve Frederick County-based organizations will receive state grants totaling more than $7.6 million to help with mental and behavioral health resources for youths as part of a broader push under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan. Sheppard Pratt Health Systems is slated to receive the most — $4 million — among Frederick County recipients, according to a news release from the state.

Maryland courts have run out of money to pay for indigent people charged with crimes to be released on home detention pending trial, putting hundreds of such defendants at risk of reincarceration, according to documents obtained by The Baltimore Sun. In 2021, the state sent $5 million to its Administrative Office of the Courts for a program that would pay private home detention companies to monitor defendants pending trial, so long as judges determined they qualified for release and couldn’t afford the service on their own, the documents show. The money came from the state’s allocation from the Congress’ Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act.

Nearly a year after formerly incarcerated transgender people testified to Maryland lawmakers about the troubling conditions they faced in state prisons and Baltimore jails, the agency in charge of their care continues to violate federal standards in how it houses trans prisoners, according to a coalition of trans rights advocates. The Trans Rights Advocacy Coalition, bolstered by policy experts and attorneys, contends that while the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has made some strides towards improving conditions, its policy of housing transgender prisoners “according to physical genitalia” violates the federal standard that those individuals should be housed on a case-by-case basis determined by health and safety and any security problems, among other factors.

The University of Maryland, College Park this month published its first research report on the institution’s connections to slavery, detailing how founder Charles B. Calvert was a descendant of enslavers and owned at least 55 slaves who worked on his Riverside plantation, land that makes up part of UMD’s campus. As part of an international consortium called Universities Studying Slavery, UMD launched The 1856 Project last year, named for the founding year of the university, then called the Maryland Agricultural College. Along with Calvert, who was a descendant of Lord Baltimore George Calvert, several of the college’s 600 initial financers were slaveholders or had ties to the slave economy.