Around Maryland

An administrative law judge in Maryland has cleared former Prince George’s County Board of Education chair Juanita Miller of misconduct charges, and said she should be able to stay on the board. In an opinion issued March 6, Judge Richard O’Connor found that Miller did not commit any of the offenses charged against her by the Maryland State Board of Education — including misconduct in office, willful neglect of duty and incompetence — and should not be required to be removed from the board.

The Baltimore Public Works Museum will reopen for the first time in more than a decade, but with a new name and identity. Now called The Public Works Experience, the museum in the old Eastern Avenue Pumping Station is modernizing its offerings to include displays on transportation, energy and other elements of urban infrastructure, according to its website.

The Baltimore City Health Department is ending its emergency response to the mpox outbreak that started last year, citing low transmission of the viral disease over the past two months. There are currently zero cases being monitored by the city health department, which announced in a Thursday news release it was demobilizing its Incident Command Structure response to mpox. The disease formerly known as monkeypox was first detected in Baltimore in June 2022.

The Maryland State Department of Education released report cards Thursday grading the state’s public schools for the 2021-22 school year, and Baltimore County Public Schools fared poorly, counting more one- and two-star schools than before the coronavirus pandemic. This is the first time since the 2018-19 school year that the school report card data has been released. For the new scores, the U.S. Department of Education allowed states like Maryland to make one-time adjustments to their rating formulas. Factors such as standardized test scores, absenteeism and graduation rates, to name a few, were taken into account.

The appetite for farm-fresh, locally grown food is strong in Montgomery County, Maryland, where there’s an effort to provide guidance to a growing segment of farmers — those from various racial and ethnic backgrounds, including Black and Indigenous farmers. A new guide put out by the Montgomery Countryside Alliance and the county’s Office of Agriculture offers a range of resources for those eager to dig in to food production.

Maryland State School Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury — a self-described data geek — arrived from Texas 18 months ago with a plan in his back pocket to redesign an essential formula for how the state calculates levels of family poverty. Now the state education department has refined that Texas plan into a model for Maryland to target money more precisely for schools with the neediest children.

The Maryland Supreme Court will consider whether a person’s consent to a warrantless search of his or her computer’s digital data can be withdrawn after a consented-to copy has been made by law enforcement. The justices last week agreed to hear the state’s appeal of a lower court decision that law enforcement officers were constitutionally bound to honor a suspected child pornographer’s withdrawal of his consent to their pending warrantless search of his computer even though a week had passed and they had already copied the hard drive.

While a large recreational cannabis industry bill is taking up most of Maryland lawmakers’ time on the issue, a proposed pilot program would start allowing police to test drivers who officers believe are impaired by cannabis.

You don’t need to hop on a MARC train or fight the crowds in Washington, D.C. to see cherry blossoms this month. Fort McHenry, in South Baltimore, is the home of two groves of Yoshino Cherry trees, the very same kind that surrounds the Tidal Basin in D.C. Peak bloom — the time when 70% of the blossoms on the tree are open — for the cherry groves at Fort McHenry is estimated to be from March 24-28. It’s about the same timeframe as last year, when peak bloom was predicted to be from March 25-28.