Around Maryland

Hagerstown motorists have an opportunity to share feedback about traffic concerns, including those affecting pedestrians and bicyclists, with local and regional planning officials through a survey that must be completed by Friday. As of Monday morning, 449 people had submitted responses through the survey, said Matt Mullenax, executive director for the Hagerstown/Eastern Panhandle Metropolitan Planning Organization, or HEPMPO.

As the Prince George’s County Public School System celebrated National Energy Efficiency Day, school leaders and others from the Maryland community gathered at Ellen Ochoa Middle School in Landover Hills to see what the future of new school construction will be like. A new school that opened this fall, Ellen Ochoa Middle School, sits on a big plot of land. Underground there are 90 geothermal wells that run 400 feet deep, but at ground level, one can’t even tell.

As the anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war approaches, people around the Washington region are mourning, praying, rallying and finding comfort in their communities. The nation’s capital has seen a steady drumbeat of vigils and protests since the conflict erupted nearly a year ago on Oct. 7, when Hamas militants attacked Israel, prompting a devastating military response.

Nearly one-fifth of garbage workers in Baltimore’s Department of Public Works don’t have city health insurance, a fact some of them didn’t realize until the inspector general started looking into the question last month. That finding, detailed in a report released Tuesday by the Office of the Inspector General, comes eight weeks after a trash collector for the Department of Public Works overheated on the job, collapsed and died.

Can you find the area of a cylinder? Add exponential numbers? Solve a system of equations? Eighth graders in Maryland are supposed to know how to do all of that and more. But the latest round of state test scores shows that very few of them do. Just 7% of test-takers passed the state’s eighth grade math test, part of the Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.

A student group at the University of Maryland can go ahead with a previously planned event commemorating the anniversary of the Hamas attacks in Israel after administration officials revoked their ability to hold the vigil, a federal judge said Tuesday. Students for Justice in Palestine introduced the lawsuit in federal court last month when the university — facing public pressure and citing safety concerns — allowed and then reversed course on a vigil the group planned for Oct. 7.

David Rubenstein didn’t get into the baseball business to make money, but to “make a great baseball team,” the 75-year-old owner of the Baltimore Orioles said Tuesday. Rubenstein was speaking at iMPACT Maryland, a regional thought leadership conference hosted by The Baltimore Banner. Rubenstein was interviewed by The Baltimore Banner’s Editor-in-Chief Kimi Yoshino. (Photo: Eric Thompson/for The Baltimore Banner)

Amtrak’s Frederick Douglass Tunnel project in West Baltimore faced delays due to a short-staffed team and had an ineffective management structure, an audit released Tuesday found. The issues with the $6 billion infrastructure project, in which Amtrak is replacing the 151-year-old Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, are being resolved as Amtrak develops a structure, the federal rail corporation’s Office of the Inspector General found.

Drug overdose deaths in Carroll County dropped 25.93% in 2023, from the prior year, according to the Maryland Department of Health. The downward trend started in 2022, when deaths from drug overdose dropped 8.47% from 2021. In 2021, the county saw a 28.26% increase in overdose deaths when compared to 2020. The isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic fueled a spike in overdose deaths nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.