Around Maryland

Baltimore’s corner of the Chesapeake Bay has had a fixed ceiling of sorts — the 185-feet vertical clearance of the area’s bridges — for the past 70 years. Soon, authorities will decide if they want to raise that limit and by how much. It’s a once-in-a-century opportunity, a decision that will define the vertical limits of the corridor for decades.

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) improperly used emergency procurements to acquire crisis management and communication services in the wake of a scandal involving former middle school principal Joel Beidleman, according to a report released Thursday by the county Office of the Inspector General (OIG). Beidleman was a former Farquhar Middle School principal who the inspector general’s office determined Dec. 1 had engaged in bullying and harassment and violated the school system’s code of conduct.

A summer camp hosted at the University of Maryland is trying to make playing sports more accessible for lower-income kids with a focus on important life lessons. The program, LiFESports, started at Ohio State University and is replicated at other colleges around the country. It provides middle school students with four weeks of free summer camp, with transportation and meals included, and introduces them to a different sport every day. This is the program’s first year in College Park, and it’ll be hosting about 30 kids from Mount Rainier.

Frederick County’s four charter schools recently filed a petition with the Maryland State Board of Education after Frederick County Public Schools implemented a new funding formula that gives the schools 75% of their per-pupil allocated funds rather than 100%. During a May 29 meeting, the county’s Board of Education approved reducing the four charter schools’ per-pupil allocation (PPA) from $12,749 in fiscal year 2024 to an average of $11,738 in fiscal year 2025.

Krystal Gonzalez prays everyday, normally while on a walk in nature. Sometimes her daughter or another one of her three surviving children will walk alongside her. Other times Krystal is alone with God and the memory of Aaliyah. When she lost her daughter, Gonzalez began to study how other cultures handle death. “In Indian culture, there was a tradition that when a person dies in the family, not just the household, but in the family, each person moves a piece of furniture,” Gonzalez says, “When they wake up in the morning, there’s this visual representation that everything has changed. Because everything has changed.”

Wednesday marked three months since the container ship Dali lost power in the early hours of March 26 and ran into a support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, knocking down the structure. The collapse killed six construction workers, partially blocked Baltimore’s shipping channel until June and eliminated one of three harbor crossings in the city, slowing vehicular traffic.

After a big surge in fatal crashes that claimed the lives of pedestrians in recent years, a new report from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association showed nationwide there was a more than 5% decline in such crashes in 2023 compared to 2022. But as encouraging as that sounds, the numbers are still much higher than those recorded nationwide before the pandemic, and still over 77% higher compared to 2010.

Ahead of July 4 celebrations next week, state fire marshal and health care officials on Wednesday outlined how to handle legal fireworks safely and cautioned against illegal fireworks in a demonstration showing the effects of firework explosions on the human body. Fireworks can easily cause surrounding structures, vegetation and clothing to catch fire, according to Acting State Fire Marshal Jason Mowbray.