Around Maryland

Wanda Knotts is a physical education and health teacher at Crossland High School in Temple Hills, Maryland. For the fourth year in a row, she’s spearheading a backpack giveaway at the school for any student in need on Aug. 17. The backpacks, for pre-K through high school students, will be filled with school supplies including notebooks, pencils, erasers and pens.

Since Baltimore asked residents in December to test their home’s water line for lead and submit the results to the city, nearly 4,500 have done so. Meanwhile, about 173,000 properties still have unknown water service pipe materials, said Paul Sayan, acting bureau chief of water and wastewater for the Baltimore City Department of Public Works.

On a rainy Wednesday evening at a public hearing about a proposed public garden — Howard County’s first — there seemed to be an elephant in the room. About a dozen or so people spoke and offered ideas to the county’s garden focus group last month about what native plants they want to see when the garden, to be located on a former plantation along Route 97 in the western part of the county, comes to fruition.

When he’s breaking — sometimes called break dancing, by those who aren’t in-the-know — Coleman “Church” Caldwell, 32, feels a mix of anxiety and freedom. Dancing surrounded by a circle of fellow breakers, called B-boys and B-girls, in a formation named a cypher is “an opportunity to show yourself.” “It’s kind of like speaking a different language that everybody can understand,” said Caldwell, who lives in Anne Arundel County. “It is truly poetry in motion.”

Hagerstown Police Chief Paul Kifer acknowledged this week that the city had a “rough couple of weeks” recently with two homicides and even more shootings. One homicide or one shooting is too many, Kifer said. Kifer talked about the shootings and homicides that occurred in late July and early August during interviews with The Herald-Mail at National Night Out at Fairgrounds Park on Tuesday evening and in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Montgomery County’s recently appointed school Superintendent Thomas Taylor is excited about the coming school year. At the weekly briefing held by Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, Taylor declared, “This is going to be a great school year!” Taylor said the school system’s goal has been to fill 900 positions for the new year. Currently, 160 full-time slots remain open and 100 part-time slots are unfilled. But he added, “that’s tremendous progress,” noting that a week ago, the full-time vacancies totaled “a little over 200.”

The Maryland Board of Public Works retroactively approved a contract Wednesday that allowed the state to provide financial assistance payments to workers displaced by the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. “That first morning when we were down there with the divers, when we asked them about what they could see, the answer we heard from almost all of the divers was ‘about nothing,’ because they couldn’t see a foot past in front of them because of the amount of debris that was in the water,” Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, said at Wednesday’s meeting in Annapolis.

U.S. News and World Report released its annual list of healthiest communities in America and Maryland has six in the top 300. Howard County ranked the highest coming in at No. 20. Montgomery County was also high on the list at No. 56. Carroll County ranks No. 156, Frederick County No. 223, Harford County No. 264 and Anne Arundel County ranks No. 300.