Around Maryland

For many students in Montgomery County public schools, the bathrooms remain a no-go zone due to drug use and fighting. That’s according to testimony at the most recent Board of Education meeting on April 11. During the public comment segment of the meeting, David Gebler, an English teacher at Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, told board members that often, “the halls reek of marijuana.”

Tasha Gresham-James steers her black Nissan Rogue through Dundalk’s rush-hour traffic. Even with the windows closed, the pungent odor of diesel fuel is hard to miss, as are the single-family houses that sit cheek by jowl with truck parking lots, bars, manufacturing and transit facilities — even a driver training school. On and on, through main roads like Holabird and Dundalk avenues, and alleyways not much wider than driveways, trucks lumber through residential neighborhoods.

After months of a nationwide search and interviews, the Columbia Association has selected a new leader. Shawn MacInnes will start as the organization’s new president and CEO on June 17, according to a news release. The Columbia Association, a massive homeowners group that in many ways functions like a city government, has been without a full-time president and CEO since Lakey Boyd’s abrupt departure 15 months ago.

Child advocacy services are expanding into southern Worcester County. The Cricket Center provides counseling as well as medical and legal help to child and teen victims of violent crimes and other traumatic experiences. Before Monday, youth in need in places like Pocomoke City, Stocton, Girdletree, and Snow Hill had to make the trek up U.S. Route 113 to the Cricket Center’s Berlin, Md. facility for help, which may have discouraged some from getting the help they needed.

Garrett County commissioners appointed two new members to an advisory board they cut ties with two days later. At a commissioner meeting Tuesday, Chairman Paul Edwards said county officials convened the Youghiogheny Scenic and Wild River Advisory Board at the state’s direction after plans for the Swallow Falls bridge replacement project were presented last year.

Baltimore City is accepting applications from people interested in bringing vacant homes back to life. The city’s Buy Into Bmore Fixed Pricing Program offers city-owned vacant houses for as cheap as $1. Officials held a webinar information session on Thursday. Felicia Taylor was one of more than 150 people who logged on. “Just to see all the buildings and things that are unoccupied or uninhabitable and are just sitting there, it hurts to know that people could be living in those,” she said.

When her husband was undergoing cancer treatment, Cindy Perez of Southwest Ranches, Fla., learned about a new blood test that could help find early cancers. The 50-year-old said she felt fine, but her husband urged her to take the test anyway. To her surprise, the blood test — called Galleri — came back positive. Scans revealed a small tumor in her groin and a diagnosis of mantle cell lymphoma, a rare but aggressive form of cancer.

Across the country, authorities have been increasingly using genetic technology to solve decades-old cases that had captivated the public and confounded law enforcement. But in Baltimore, where there are thousands of unsolved homicides, it has yet to occur. The Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office is hoping to change that, creating a new cold case division within the homicide unit that will pursue funding for forensic genealogy testing — which involves using DNA submitted to family tree websites and famously helped solve the Golden State Killer case — and work with detectives to better strategize around unsolved cases that may be ripe for a fresh look.

In early April, a WTOP staffer noticed an unusual number of streetlights were out along the Beltway in Maryland, with more than 60 spotted between Interstate 95 and the exit to Connecticut Avenue. This left large sections of the interstate where streetlights exist, in the dark. Was it just one section of highway being plagued by the outages?