Around Maryland

As we look forward to the second half of our school year, Baltimore City school staff, the Baltimore Teachers Union and Baltimore City Public Schools need to work on an overhaul of teacher salaries and the teacher evaluation process. According to data from the Maryland State Department of Education, the salaries of Baltimore City teachers with master’s degrees became the lowest among Maryland jurisdictions in 2020. Starting salaries for Baltimore teachers now rank at No. 20 out of 24 school districts.

Maryland’s second-largest school system reached a tentative agreement with its teachers union this week, after a roughly two-month impasse. The Prince George’s County Educators’ Association — which represents about 10,000 educators — announced the agreement in a statement Wednesday. The union characterized the deal as making “strides on empowering educators to lead the district,” but there was little information shared about the agreement’s details. A spokeswoman for the union said further details will be released in September, when the contract is ratified.

Though Marylanders will be missing out on a total solar eclipse passing over Western Australia in 2023, and a “ring of fire” eclipse crossing the Western United States, there’s still plenty to look for in the skies in the coming year. Maryland observers will be able to catch the moon obscuring part of the sun’s face during the mid-October eclipse, and dark skies will accompany some of the year’s strongest meteor showers, the Perseids and the Geminids, thanks to the phase of the moon. That makes for ideal viewing — as long as the weather holds.

The average price for regular unleaded fuel in Maryland on Monday was 25 cents more compared to this time a week ago. According to AAA, the average price for regular unleaded fuel in Maryland was $3.30 per gallon. This time last week, the price was $3.05. Maryland's price of fuel was above the national average. The country's average on Monday was $3.21 per gallon of regular gas.

Imagine thousands of potential employees vanishing into thin air. That's the prospect many metro areas are facing, thanks to the demographic shifts taking place in the American workforce. Between the relatively small size of Generation Z, declining birth rates and low immigration totals, experts say the tight labor market of the Covid-19 era is likely to stick around for the long term — even if there is a recession.

The Baltimore Banner on Thursday sued the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, alleging that the agency is improperly denying access to key portions of autopsy reports that are public records under state law — despite providing these documents in the past. For more than three months, reporters from The Banner have been seeking autopsy records for reporting about the opioid epidemic in Maryland. But the medical examiner’s office has “frustrated the letter and the spirit of the law,” the lawsuit asserts, by arbitrarily refusing to turn over critical portions of these documents — including pages that document toxicological findings and contain information about the age, race and gender of people who fatally overdosed, and the locations where they were found.

Adnan Syed is now an employee of Georgetown University, the private university in Washington, D.C., announced Wednesday. Georgetown hired Syed, who was freed three months ago after 23 years in a Maryland prison, as a program associate for the university’s Prisons and Justice Initiative. One of his responsibilities will be working with the initiative’s “Making an Exoneree” class, during which students reinvestigate decades-old wrongful convictions and create short documentaries about the cases to “help bring innocent people home from prison,” the university said.

Operations were smooth Thursday at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, but not so much at hubs in other parts of the country as a storm moves through. The Christmas holiday season is the second busiest at Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall Airport. Officials told 11 News they're keeping a close eye on hubs in the Midwest and the Northeast as they anticipate an estimated 30,000 departing passengers Thursday and Friday.

Eliana Joftus couldn’t believe someone had spray-painted “Jews Not Welcome” on the entrance sign to her campus, Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. Days before, she’d helped lead a lesson as president of the school’s Jewish Student Union on how to combat stereotypes and be an ally to Jewish students. The graffiti was clearly a response to that lesson, she suspected. “It could have been just coincidence, but chances are it wasn’t,” Joftus, 17, said. She added that teachers had also received antisemitic emails from a sender outside of the school system over the weekend, confirming that the action wasn’t random. “It really had purpose and motivation behind it.”