Around Maryland

Clarence Crawford, president of the Maryland State Board of Education, started Tuesday’s meeting with a declaration. “Business as usual in Maryland public education is over,” he said. “It’s dead.” The state is overhauling its public education system as part of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a 10-year reform plan with billions in funding. Public school leaders are contending with significant changes to teacher salaries, literacy instruction and academic standards while figuring out how to budget for those reforms.

One of the few tall ships that still navigate the globe will sail by Fort McHenry before making a dramatic entrance and docking in the Inner Harbor next month. BAP Unión, a Peruvian naval vessel, is scheduled to arrive in Baltimore on March 2 and remain docked until March 5. The boat is scheduled to pass Fort McHenry at 9 a.m. and reach its destination and berth in the Inner Harbor at 11 a.m., according to PromPeru, the country’s tourism agency.

For Baltimore City eighth graders, there’s a rite of passage that comes around this time every year when they learn what high school they will go to in August. It’s a bit like getting college acceptance letters, but everyone gets theirs on the same day. This year, anticipation grew on Presidents Day when families checked online for the results. But when results were finally posted late in the evening, for 199 of the 5,129 students, they were, well, quite confusing. Some students had been waitlisted everywhere, or they hadn’t gotten in to schools they were pretty sure they should have.

The goal was to make it simpler and faster for prospective college students to apply for federal financial. Cue chaos. The rollout of the new 2024-2025 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) has been anything but simple and fast. Normally available for families to fill out by Oct. 1 of the preceding academic year, this year’s revised FAFSA was not available until the start of January 2024.

A Maryland State Highway Administration contractor has started an $8.9 million project to improve the U.S. 40 bridge decks over Interstate 70 east of Hagerstown. Weather permitting, the project is expected to be finished next year, according to a state highway release. The project involves detours while barriers are put in place and closing a lane in each direction so crews can work safely.

A bill from state Del. Kris Fair (D-3) would enable Maryland’s 23 counties and the city of Baltimore to establish special tax rates for different categories of real property. Under the current state law, county jurisdictions are authorized to set a single tax rate for all real property. For fiscal year 2024, Frederick County’s property tax rate was set at $1.06 per $100 of assessed value. If enacted, HB919 would grant county jurisdictions the authority to set a special tax rate of up to 12.5 cents per $100 of assessed value for six different categories of real property, including:

Dr. Elizabeth Clayborne is beating the odds. Since she started fundraising in 2021, Clayborne said she’s raised $3.25 million for her medical device company, NasaClip. As a biracial Black woman, the numbers aren’t necessarily always on Clayborne’s side — in 2021, startups founded by Black women received just 0.34% of venture capital funds nationally — but she wants to be more than the exception.

Senior living homes across Maryland are making efforts to go green. A 2022 study found that seniors in wealthy countries were on track to become the highest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions as compared to other age groups. The study found that in countries like the U.S. where many seniors live in older single-family homes, consumption of energy increases. But there are ways to mitigate that, and many senior communities in Maryland are taking steps to become more sustainable and climate-friendly.

Tucked into an unassuming corner in southwestern Columbia sits a historic Black church with roots dating back before the Civil War, including connections to the Underground Railroad. Now after receiving $233,500 in state funding, the 150-person congregation is hoping it will be better able to preserve that history. Marion Esterling, the pastor of Locust United Methodist Church, said that he felt humbled to be one of 24 Maryland groups to get the funding and that the congregation looked forward to using it to carry on the church’s legacy “for another 155 years.”