Around Maryland

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for when a city contains more than 13,000 vacant homes and some 20,000 empty lots. Instead, Baltimore’s vast vacant housing landscape has ushered in waves of new ideas — and people, all hoping to slice off a piece of the pie. WaterBottle, a worker-owned cooperative, is one such example.

Maryland’s colleges and universities were reminded Monday that they have until Aug. 1 to update their Title IX guidelines to ensure all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, can participate in all programs. While Monday’s presentation was made to the University System of Maryland (USM) Board of Regents’ Intercollegiate Athletics and Student-Athlete Health and Welfare, a system vice chancellor said that a school’s failure to comply in any area could result in an institution not receiving federal money such as financial aid.

Dozens of parents and kids staged a sit-in outside Montgomery County Public Schools’ Board of Education headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, on Monday to demand the school system continue its virtual learning program. The school system announced last week that it would be shutting the Montgomery Virtual Academy (MVA) down due to budget constraints, leaving around 800 kids that are currently enrolled in the program in a lurch.

Larnell Robinson sat at a desk in his cluttered office last September, between a bookshelf full of Bibles and a table stacked with the overdose antidote Narcan. He slid out a list of residents of the West Baltimore high-rise where he was tenant council president — one of dozens of subsidized complexes that house the city’s poor seniors. One by one, he began scratching through names, conducting a grim accounting of the dead.

A Boonsboro High School student was not allowed to participate at her graduation ceremony Tuesday night because of concerns surrounding her makeup, leaving the 18-year-old and her family "heartbroken" on the big day. Nixx Cabrera-Guy is an aspiring piercer and tattoo artist and is the first person on her father's side of the family to receive her high school diploma. She said she was told by the Boonsboro High principal, Michael Kuhaneck, that she had to remove her makeup or she could not sit with her fellow students or walk on stage during the ceremony.

Since the collapse of the Key Bridge and the closure of the Port of Baltimore, the Maryland Food Bank said it has seen a rise of families in need. “The general consensus is they’re seeing anywhere from 20% to 30% increase in the amount of demand,” said Maryland Food Bank President and CEO Carmen Del Guercio, speaking about Baltimore-area partners since the bridge collapse.

On Maryland’s path to becoming one of the country’s biggest targets for fraud aimed at benefits for lower-income residents, the problem looked, at first, like maybe it involved just a few thousand claims. But the theft went largely unchecked, and the claims, paid off by taxpayers, kept rising. By the time the state started a new reimbursement process in early 2023, what had been less than $1 million in benefits the state had to restore to victims of fraud quickly turned into $4.3 million over two years.

The Maryland Institute College of Art announced they’re permanently hiring Cecilia McCormick to lead the historic Baltimore school as its next president. McCormick had been serving since January in an interim role and was chosen to head the college after an extensive review process involving trustees, staff, faculty and students, according to a statement.