In the coming decade, Frederick County will need to replace one aging high school and add a new high school, as well as build more elementary and middle schools as the system copes with the exploding numbers of students. Many millions of dollars will go into new construction for the school system. Then we will have to hire staff members for all of those new schools — administrators, teachers, guidance counselors, coaches, secretaries and janitors. That means many, many millions more every year for education, just to stay in place.

Romy Pittman’s last day at Annapolis High School was Wednesday. She packed up after four years of teaching U.S. history and headed for the door one final time. While teaching at one of Maryland’s most diverse, complicated schools, Pittman proved herself a mentor for teachers and students. But that last drive from the school parking lot onto Riva Road wasn’t the end of her 30 years in education.

With the official start of Maryland’s summer beach season — the Fourth of July — within view, you can bet that weekend traffic backups along U.S. 50 at Sandy Point and Kent Island are not far off. It’s a tradition as old as the first two-lane Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which opened in 1952, and has kept right up through the addition of the three-lane parallel crossing in 1973 (especially Saturday morning eastbound and Sunday afternoon headed west).

I went to prison 31 years ago for serious violent crime committed when I was 16-years-old. During my incarceration, I followed the rules, avoided trouble and participated in nearly every workshop, course and program that was offered, with titles like “Alternatives to Violence,” “Thinking for a Change,” and “Stress Management.”

In politics, money talks. And no one knows this better than the politicians running for elected office. It takes a lot of cash to pay for all those campaign ads, from TV commercials to pop-ups on social media, and the fastest way to raise the needed funds is to ask those who have a major stake in decision-making — from big business and labor unions to government contractors — to write the checks.

The news that Frederick County has a new flag likely provoked a few questions among residents, including “Why?” and “Why that one?” Some might have wondered: “Frederick County has a flag?” The winning design for the county flag was done by Marc DeOcampo, a registered architect who is the city of Frederick’s director of strategic planning.

 

What’s in a name? When a fire or other disaster strikes, do we turn desperately for rescue only to firemen, or do we welcome help from any and all firefighters? Right now, the name of our state’s firefighter’s association is Maryland State Firemen’s Association. Fortunately, the MSFA has the opportunity to modify its name at its June convention.

 

Three years ago, termite damage convinced the arbiters of public art in Annapolis that it was time to end the nine-year run of Bobby Donovan’s cedar sculpture, “Shoal,” at the center of Westgate Circle near downtown. Always intended as a temporary installation atop the grassy center of a traffic roundabout, the work was meant to evoke the ribs of a ship in a boaty town.

Gov. Wes Moore is moving forward with his campaign promise to restore the Red Line, the 14-mile east-west transit link from the Centers for Medicaid Services in Woodlawn to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. The $2.9 billion project, pursued as a light rail line for a generation, was unceremoniously dumped in 2015 by then-Gov. Larry Hogan, despite the huge sums invested in planning and preparation and a $900 million commitment from the federal government.

Michael Harrison became Baltimore’s police commissioner in March 2019. He landed on his feet, and a good thing that, considering the dung heap he parachuted onto. He had to contend with the lingering community hostility in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s police-involved death, the revolving door of commissioners, the criminal scandal of the mayor who had appointed him, and a federal court consent decree mandating a revamping of the Baltimore Police Department from top to bottom.