Around Maryland

As the beginning of the school year approaches, the Baltimore region is facing a high number of teacher vacancies. A presentation at Tuesday’s Maryland State Department of Education board meeting described nearly 2,000 teacher vacancies statewide as of September 2021. Individual school systems such as Baltimore City and Prince George’s County are still reporting high numbers of vacancies as the 2022-23 school year approaches.

The teenage squeegee worker accused of fatally shooting Timothy Reynolds was defending himself and should not face criminal charges, a group of activists joined by the youth’s family insisted on Monday night. Just under two dozen protesters gathered in McKeldin Plaza in the Inner Harbor near the intersection of Light and Conway streets where a confrontation July 7 between a 48-year-old white man wielding a baseball bat and a group of young Black squeegee workers resulted in the Hampden man’s death.

With Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh leaving office in the coming months, survivors of clergy sexual abuse are calling on him to update the public on his office’s investigation of the Catholic Church in Maryland. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests plans a Tuesday news conference outside the attorney general’s Baltimore office to “call for openness and transparency” about the probe.

David Barker did not live to see Anne Arundel County waters become a federal No Discharge Zone, but were it not for his advocacy, it might still be legal for boats to dump sewage into the Severn River. Barker, founding president of the Back Creek Conservancy and a former president of the Severn River Association, died in May at age 77 after contracting the coronavirus. Six weeks later, all navigable rivers in the county, with the exception of the Patuxent River bordering Baltimore County, became a federally recognized “No Discharge Zone.”

Plans for a hotel and conference center in downtown Frederick are expected to come before the city in the fall, the next step in the lengthy process between the city and a local hospitality company. Plans for the project are expected to come before the city’s Planning Commission by October or November, while the city and Plamondon Hospitality Partners work to iron out legal details of the deal.

A heady pulse of dance beats led Roosevelt Brown to park his car on his journey home through Clifton Park on Sunday afternoon. The thumping music, a fast-paced mixture of disco and soul, drifted from a park stage where six DJs spun records as part of an annual event hosted by Hug Don’t Shoot, a nonprofit run by Val Jenkins. Brown stopped to check out the scene at the “Christmas in July Music Fest” back-to-school giveaway and continued his trip home to Broadway East with a bag of nonperishable food and toys for his granddaughter.

Fresh seafood is on special this summer at the Westfield Annapolis Mall. As many shoppers and diners have noticed in recent weeks, a pair of osprey are raising a chick on a lighting fixture outside the former Macaroni Grill, near the intersection of Generals Highway and Bestgate Road. You don’t have to be an ornithologist to know that osprey typically nest near water, and a parking lot seems like a ridiculous choice for birds who depend on fresh fish for food. But Dave Brinker, a regional ecologist with the Maryland Heritage Wildlife Program, a branch of the Department of Natural Resources, says the nesting site represents progress, population growth and a formerly endangered species that has survived by becoming more flexible.

A 26-foot statue of the Virgin Mary is back in place at a Catholic university in Maryland. The Frederick News-Post reports that the statue has been put back in place atop a 78-foot pedestal at the National Shrine Grotto on the campus of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg after a year of restoration work. That work continues even as the statue is back in place, surrounded by scaffolding. Workers are now in the process of layering gold leaf to statue’s exterior. The university has raised $400,000 to support the restoration; about $450,000 more is needed.