Around Maryland

The Carroll County Board of Education will be asked to approve the school system’s $45.9 million capital budget request for fiscal 2025 on Wednesday at its monthly meeting. The request is $2.1 million higher than the version presented last month to the school board, mostly to accommodate new classroom space at Sandymount Elementary School. The school board said last month that it would prioritize construction projects at Liberty High, Sykesville Middle, Freedom Elementary, Cranberry Station Elementary, Friendship Valley Elementary, Sandymount Elementary and Taneytown Elementary schools in the 2025 capital budget.

A former legal secretary is suing Tydings & Rosenberg LLP over the law firm’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for employees.The federal civil rights lawsuit claims the firm rejected a religious exemption for the ex-employee, Cheryl Shigley, and ultimately terminated her in September 2021. Shigley’s suit asks a judge to reinstate her job at Tydings and order the firm to provide back pay and punitive damages.

Transit fare vending machines at bus and train stations around Baltimore will not accept credit cards for over a year while undergoing a software upgrade, the Maryland Department of Transportation said in a news release Monday. The outage is expected to begin Friday and continue until Dec. 2024 at Maryland Transit Administration bus, light rail and metro subway stations. Around 10% of fares purchased at the machines are by credit card, according to the department, and MARC train ticketing machines will not be impacted.

The number of juveniles being arrested in Montgomery County, Maryland, is down compared to 2019, but the nature of the crimes — and the ages of some of the juveniles involved — is what concerns police, prosecutors and the community. In 2019, there were 1,646 arrests of juveniles in Montgomery County, according to data from the Montgomery County Police Department provided to WTOP. That number plummeted to 393 in 2021 — during the height of the pandemic — but has steadily climbed since then.

Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg was about to deliver a sermon as part of a normally cheerful Jewish holiday celebration when word came that the “unthinkable” had happened: The militant group Hamas launched a broad-scale attack, sending thousands of missiles and groups of fighters into Israel, killing and kidnapping people by the hundreds. Wohlberg did something he’d never done in more than 50 years of public speaking: he tossed his notes and spoke off the cuff. He implored listeners last weekend to accept that such an attack is in Hamas’ nature.

The Baltimore Metropolitan Council’s “Look Alive” campaign took to the streets of Annapolis Thursday to educate drivers and pedestrians on the importance of roadway safety. The campaign deployed five “signal people” to perform an interactive campaign by walking the crosswalks of the four-way Forest Drive and Hillsmere Drive intersection, reminding drivers and walkers to obey traffic signs that are meant to keep them safe.

As Maryland policymakers look to fulfill the state’s many mandated climate goals, a new report suggests that the fossil fuel appliances and other heavy equipment used to power homes and businesses are contributing far more to poor air quality than all of the state’s power plants combined. In fact, furnaces, HVAC systems, water heaters and other equipment powered by fossil fuels emit more than three times as much health-harming nitrogen oxides as the state’s power plants, according to the study, “Cutting Through The Smog: How Air Quality Standards Help Solve the Hidden Health Toll of Air Pollution from Maryland’s Homes and Businesses.”

As the Latino community grows in Maryland, women leaders from the community are rising to positions of power, organizing change and making a path for the next generation of leaders. The Latino population in Maryland grew from 8% to 12% in a decade, or to some 744,000 in the 2020 Census, with the largest communities in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. During Hispanic Heritage Month — which runs from mid-September to mid-October and celebrates the historic Independence of the Spanish republics of the Americas and the contributions of Hispanics in the United States — Maryland Matters is profiling three Latina leaders in the state.

For the first time in more than 26 years, Maryland lawyers have new font options for the briefs they file in the state’s appellate courts. In an administrative order issued last week, Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader approved an updated list of fonts for filings in the Maryland Supreme Court and Appellate Court. The list comes two months after the justices received a letter from Joseph Dudek, an insurance coverage and appellate attorney at Kramon & Graham, P.A., requesting a modernized font selection. According to Fader’s order, the font list had not been updated since July 1, 1997.