Around Maryland

The University of Maryland’s law school announced Sunday it is launching a center focused on racial justice in Baltimore and beyond, an attempt to align itself with Baltimore’s history and current challenges with racial inequality. Named after the law school’s first Black tenured professors, Larry Gibson and Taunya Banks, the Gibson-Banks Center for Race and the Law will “re-imagine and transform institutions and systems of racial and intersectional inequality, marginalization, and oppression,” the center’s newly named director Michael Pinard wrote in an open letter.

The leadership at Frederick Municipal Airport believe it is well past time to highlight their facility as a valuable community hub. They are doing so through their first-ever Festival of Flight: Meet Your Airport open house, which will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sept. 30. The event will include aircrafts on display, local vendors, airport employee and instructor talks, kids activities and food trucks. Attendance is free to the public, and the event will be held rain or shine.

The City of Annapolis received a $224,000 grant from the Maryland Department of Transportation to begin designing a bike path that will connect downtown to Quiet Waters Park. The announcement of the grant, from the department’s Kim Lamphier Bikeways Network Program, came Monday, two days before the city announced that an electric trolley would begin running in Eastport to popularize public, environmentally-conscious transportation in the city.

Last month in Howard County, Maryland, many public school students started their new school year waiting on the curb as school buses were hours late to pick them up or didn’t show up at all. Now, the Maryland School Bus Contractors Association, which represents 3,000 school buses in 19 of the state’s 24 jurisdictions, is weighing in and calling on the county school system to terminate its contract with California-based company Zum Transportation that operates 210+ buses for the school system.

A light rain misted the Frederick Fairgrounds Sunday morning as people broke down their vendor tents, loaded their campers and cleaned out the stables on the last day of the 161st Great Frederick Fair. Despite some rain, total attendance for this year’s fair was on par with previous years at around 200,000 people, general manager Karen Nicklas wrote in an email Sunday. Friday had the largest number of attendees with 35,000 people, she wrote.

Baltimore City Public Schools leaders remain on a mission to vaccinate thousands of students. This is the first year that administrators opened district headquarters to offer shots. Some might say the North Avenue administration building is the most unlikely place to have students vaccinated, but the district said it’s all about making the clinics convenient for families.

Prince George’s County Public Schools will use about $2.3 million from a legal settlement with Juul Labs — the e-cigarette manufacturer — to fight youth vaping and nicotine addiction, according to a memo from the school system. With little discussion, the school board unanimously approved the use of the settlement’s revenue during a meeting Thursday evening.

Walk through the Old Goucher neighborhood in North Baltimore, and husbands Kelly Cross and Mateusz Rozanski will tell you how several of the tree-lined streets weren’t always filled with such greenery. The couple planted hundreds of trees and took out over 100 tons of concrete in the neighborhood over the past decade.

Fresh after the rains from Tropical Storm Ophelia, a steady stream of Artscape attendees trekked up and down Charles Street, but it didn’t seem like a flood of people like years prior, say those there Sunday. The storm also caused organizers to cancel Saturday’s events and put a damper on vendor profits. Some art enthusiasts were happy to be there all the same, but questioned whether a new fall date for the festival as a good idea.