Around Maryland

Carroll County students’ proficiency in math and English generally increased last year, according to results from the Maryland State Comprehensive Assessment shared with the Board of Education last week. Carroll County Public School students outscored Maryland in all categories, and beat county test results from the 2021-2022 school year in most cases, according to data presented to the school board.

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Accountability and Implementation Board could have most of its staff filled this year, according to an update Thursday from the board’s executive director. Rachel Hise said, during an online session, that staff received at least 175 applications for five education policy analyst positions. “We have a very strong possibility of having all of them on board hopefully well before the end of the calendar year,” she said.

Beverly Taylor can’t figure out why her commute has become more congested. When summer ended and schools resumed this fall, her typical 50-minute drive from Bowie to downtown Washington began taking 75 minutes, worse than before the coronavirus pandemic started. “I don’t understand, because downtown is so vacant,” said Taylor, 60, a human resources director at a law firm.

Black Americans and other people of color have long been underrepresented in clinical trials for emerging medications and therapies — even when they’re more likely to get sick or die from the condition the treatment is meant to target. Despite being twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than white Americans, for example, Black Americans only comprised about 1 in 10 of the participants in the clinical trials for the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines.

On a Tuesday morning in mid-April, Hughes United Methodist Church Pastor Diana Wingeier is bustling about the gymnasium at the Wheaton church, moving boxes of mushrooms to the back of the room and bags of leafy greens to a table near the front door as she helps shepherd dozens of Montgomery County residents through a weekly food pantry.

The Johns Hopkins University invited public feedback Thursday on draft policies outlining how university police will operate at three Hopkins properties. Finalizing department rules is one of the last steps to establish a new police agency at Hopkins. By winter, officers will start training to patrol the Homewood academic campus, the medical campus in East Baltimore and the Peabody Institute conservatory in Mount Vernon.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona highlighted a national shortage of college counselors in an appearance with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore on Thursday morning in downtown Baltimore. At the National Association of College Admission Counseling’s annual meeting, which brought more than 7,000 attendees to the Baltimore Convention Center, Moore and Cardona spoke in a moderated conversation on a wide range of education issues to an audience of mostly high school and college staff from across the country.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that they would provide $600 million in funding for new COVID-19 tests. Additionally, they are resurrecting the government website to order those free tests. It’s an effort to prevent possible future shortages as the winter months come and the rise of coronavirus cases — as well as flu and RSV — are expected.