Around Maryland

Baltimore City’s school board has approved a $1.7 billion budget for the 2023-24 school year, with investments in academic supports for students and more than 600 new jobs across the district. The budget includes revenues tied to the state’s landmark Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform, representing a 6.3% increase over the 2022-23 academic year. System leadership previously said the budget aims to build stability and consistency, with investments in tutoring, summer extended learning, fine arts and athletics.

The U.S. has approved more than $42 billion in federal student loan debt forgiveness for more than 615,000 borrowers in the past 18 months as part of a program aimed at getting more people to work in public service jobs, the U.S. Department of Education said this week. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program is open to teachers, librarians, nurses, public interest lawyers, military members and other public workers.

Getting someone with a substance-use disorder into a recovery program is a difficult process, even if that person wants help — in part because the list of those programs is a short one. The process is made even more difficult for parents with teenagers as this list is even shorter. In the City of Frederick, Maryland, an alternative high school helps students battling addiction.

Baltimore will remove some owner-occupied homes from the city’s annual tax sale for the third consecutive year, Mayor Brandon Scott announced Wednesday, although the city’s forgiveness will be limited to properties worth $250,000 or less. The move does not forgive any debts, but it gives many homeowners time — at least a year — to get caught up on their past-due taxes before winding up on the tax sale list again.

The fentanyl epidemic has created new challenges for school systems across the country. Students are overdosing — sometimes on school grounds — in higher numbers, and school systems are racing to respond by stocking up on overdose-reversing antidotes and coming up with ways to support students’ mental health better. School systems in the D.C. region, including in Montgomery County, Maryland, are also tightening up policies when it comes to responding to overdoses on campuses.

A new report from the Chesapeake Bay Program says states need to flip the script in order to achieve pollution reduction goals for the Chesapeake Bay. The 133-page report released by the program’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee offers a range of findings about why progress toward those goals has been slow and why water quality improvements “are proving more challenging than expected.”

Quiana Roberts was so scared her first time on a gun range that she swears she saw fire come out the end of the gun. She struggled with firearms training as she worked to become a federal law enforcement agent, often shaking and crying as she held the gun. For most of her life growing up in Boston, Massachusetts, guns were associated with violence and crime. She was afraid and had been psychologically traumatized by them, she said.

Baltimore County child care providers will soon be able to apply for $5,000 in assistance from the county government to offset the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. Democratic County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. announced Tuesday that the county would open applications on May 22 for care providers to apply for grant funding using $2.5 million in federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. The application process closes June 2.