Around Maryland

At 8:30 a.m. each day, before the doors of Baltimore’s National Aquarium open to the public, its resident bottlenose dolphins begin the first of their six daily training and feeding sessions, structured much like a school day for human children. Lessons are taught, knowledge is tested, and rewards given by the humans who represent the center of their universe.

Chants of “three, two, one…LEGO!” rang out repeatedly on Sunday in the Urbana High School gym, where 32 teams of students were participating in the Frederick County qualifier for the FIRST LEGO League Challenge. The FIRST LEGO League Challenge is an engineering competition for elementary and middle school students between the ages of 9 and 14. Each team has at least two adult coaches and can have anywhere from two to 10 members.

Baltimore County’s superintendent of schools proposed cutting hundreds of jobs, but the school board won’t know which ones until after it votes on the $2.5 billion budget at the end of February. That was by design. When Superintendent Myriam Rogers proposed her fiscal 2025 budget at the beginning of January, she highlighted $29 million in savings from eliminating around 500 positions, most of them vacant.

There’s insomnia. Frantic group texts. Obsessively reloading websites. It’s summer camp sign-up time, and we parents are stressed out right now. The good news is there are a dizzying number of camps to sign up for in the Baltimore area. Your child can learn to sail, build a robot, perfect their lacrosse skills, act in a play or gallop across fields on horseback. The bad news is most camps are expensive — sending our three kids to a premium camp for two weeks would be like taking out a second mortgage. And the logistics are overwhelming.

The University of Maryland surgeons who conducted the world’s first pig-to-human heart transplants say they will be ready to perform a third operation as soon as a suitable patient is found. The two path-breaking surgeries, known as xenotransplantations, took place in 2022 and 2023 at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.

As a Palestinian American, Ruba Abukhdeir said she often feels unheard. This has been particularly true, she said, since she learned that the Howard County Council will not allow public testimony Monday night on a resolution calling for a cease-fire in war-torn Gaza. “If they think this is not local, it is local because my community feels neglected, unheard and not included,” Abukhdeir said at a press conference Friday morning in front of the county government building.

Tables with posters were set up all around Hood College’s Whitaker Campus Center on Saturday for Mobilize Frederick’s Second Annual Climate Summit. In the Hodson Auditorium, panelists spoke about environmental concerns and solutions and answered questions from rapt listeners. “There’s a lot of angst around climate change, rightly so,” said Barb Trader, Mobilize Frederick’s board president and co-founder. “And we find that in order to generate the kind of movement, we need to do more faster, we need to encourage people that there’s already a lot being done.”

At the Community College of Baltimore County, 85% of students attend school without paying tuition, but that could change because of proposed cutbacks in Gov. Wes Moore’s budget. CCBC President Sandra Kurtinitis said a proposed cut to the state funding of community colleges may force her 48,531-student institution to roll back one of its biggest aid programs, an offer of free tuition to any student whose family makes less than $150,000 a year.

As environmental advocates begin to push an audacious plan to make polluters compensate the state for the ravages of climate change, they are now armed with a poll showing voters want policymakers to be tough with fossil fuel companies. The Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) released the poll Tuesday, as lawmakers start to consider legislation that would make the 40 largest emitters of greenhouse gases in Maryland pay vast sums of money to the state for environmental degradation.