Around Maryland

The Howard County Public School System promoted the district’s chief academic officer, William Barnes, on Thursday to be the acting superintendent of the school system. Barnes has been with HCPSS for 15 years and served as the academic officer since July 2017. In that role, he oversaw curriculum and instruction, special education and student services. Barnes was previously director of secondary and pre-K–12 curricular programs, and coordinator of secondary mathematics. Before moving to Howard County schools, he was a team leader and teacher in Baltimore County. He graduated from Towson University in 1995 and earned a bachelor’s degree in math.

Frederick will receive $1 million from the state to help develop and design the proposed site of a hotel and conference center along Carroll Creek. The grant from the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development was announced Thursday as part of more than $63 million in funds for revitalization. The money will be used for site planning, engineering, grading, and necessary demolition for the hotel site at the corner of East Patrick and Carroll streets downtown, Richard Griffin, the city’s economic development director, said in an interview Thursday.

Kennedy Holland, a trans woman, spent about five years in Maryland-run jails and prisons. Despite having begun her gender transition at 13 years old, Holland was housed in male facilities or isolated. The experience terrified Holland. She recounted a time when an incarcerated man pulled her into a prison cell and told her he and his cellmate could rape her if they wanted to. “I could go nowhere. I could do nothing,” Holland said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun.

As justices consider whether a Baltimore zoning board was correct in deciding a crematory could be built at a York Road funeral home, lawyers were asked Wednesday to determine when they can argue before Maryland’s intermediate appellate court. The notice stating that oral arguments were slated for March came ahead of a Wednesday evening update from state environmental regulators, who have been waiting over the past three years to review whether to issue a construction permit to Vaughn Greene Funeral Services for the planned crematory.

The town will pursue a partnership with a local company to co-produce a monster truck event scheduled for next fall. On Tuesday, Ocean City Special Events Director Frank Miller presented the Mayor and Council with a request to partner with The Metal Shop, a Delmar-based business, to co-produce the first annual Monsters of Metal Beach Brawl. Scheduled for Oct. 18-20, Miller said the event would fill a vacant weekend on the special events calendar and offer a family friendly activity that would benefit both the organizer and the town.

The Baltimore City Public School System saw improvement in the number of schools that scored a three-star grade or above on Maryland’s school performance rating system, according to 2022-23 data released Wednesday. The Maryland Report Card grades individual schools on a one-to-five-star scale. Over a third of city schools, about 35% of its 148 schools, scored a three or above. The district is the only one in the region that saw more schools gain stars than lose them over last year, and BCPSS has more improved schools, by number and percentage, than any of the other school system in the state.

Staff at a youth detention center in Baltimore County systemically raped boys incarcerated at the facility, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The civil complaint and request for a jury trial center on the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School near Loch Raven, where 37 victims, now men between 30 and 66 years old, allege sexual abuse from the 1970s through 2009. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys from law firms Levy Konigsberg and Brown Kiely on Wednesday morning in Baltimore City Circuit Court against the State of Maryland and the Department of Juvenile Services under the Child Victims Act.

Light Rail service remains suspended Wednesday after the Maryland Transit Administration announced it would be shut down indefinitely for inspections and repairs. Meanwhile, MTA administrator Holly Arnold appeared before the Maryland Board of Public Works at a meeting. Comptroller Brooke Lierman asked her about several issues including the outage. "It is not a result of the budget actions in the past week. We were doing the overhaul and making sure we had been maintaining the system in a state of repair for the life of the vehicles.

Maryland Transportation Secretary Paul Wiedefeld and other officials have sounded the alarm this year over the long-term health of the well the state taps for funding transportation — as Marylanders hop in more electric and fuel-efficient vehicles over gas guzzlers, the state has brought in less revenue from the gas tax factored into the price at the pump. Last week, Wiedefeld announced his office would be cutting more than $3 billion worth of funding from the state transportation budget it sends to lawmakers for signature, citing declining revenues and increasing costs.