Commentary

On Tuesday, Baltimore Mayor Brandon M. Scott lifted the masking requirement he had put in place for City Hall during the pandemic. “With this announcement,” he said in a news release, “we take one more step toward returning city business to a state of normalcy after a long and difficult chapter in our history.”

Across Maryland, local governments are putting together their Fiscal 2024 budgets, and a familiar pattern has emerged. Without the safety net of federal American Rescue Plan funding made available during the peak COVID-19 years and, on the other side of the ledger, expanded K-12 public school costs mandated by the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, some are finding their resources stretched thin.

Maryland’s 2023 legislative session has ended, and it is time to take account of legislative casualties. One such casualty was House Bill 96/Senate Bill 93, the Youth Equity and Safety Act, which was stalled in committee. This is a juvenile justice bill championed, respectively, by Del. Charlotte Crutchfield (D-Montgomery) and Sen. Jill Carter (D-Baltimore City), that would end, once and for all, the automatic charging of youth who commit any one of 33 offenses as if they were adults. It would end a practice that has failed young people and our communities.

I always laugh a little when I see ads for Mother’s Day presents inviting grateful children to take their maternal parental figure to lunch, buy her flowers or jewelry, or send her to a quaint bed and breakfast. I laugh because I am a single mother whose child lacks both the height to reach the cereal and credit enough to shell out for brunch. Just like at Christmas, unless some other relative makes sure he has a gift ready to give me, I’m pouring my own special holiday coffee. And that’s OK.

The Frederick County Council made a puzzling choice recently when it refused to rezone roughly 223 acres in Adamstown from agricultural use to general industrial use. The owners of the land, Windridge Properties LLC and Windridge Farm LLC, did not submit development plans, but indicated that they were seeking approval to move forward on a future data center development.

For several weeks I have been researching a commentary, working title, “Should state schools superintendent Mohammed Choudhury stay or go?” And in a submission I sent in this week, I attempted a balanced analysis of his controversial two years in office. He (by July 1) and the State Board of Education (by no later than around September 30) must declare whether they are interested in renewing his contract, which expires in June 2024.

I am a pediatric psychologist working with youth who have chronic illnesses in Baltimore, a city with generations of disinvestment and trauma. The past four years have been marked by a notable increase in the number of children referred to me with psychological distress that is worsening their physical and emotional well-being. What started as a relatively lengthy waitlist, has evolved into a seemingly endless list of patient names.

At the funeral of a colleague who died young, the priest felt it important to warn the non-Catholics in attendance that they were forbidden to take Communion with the rest of us. The admonition was not gentle, it was crisp. And disgusting. How could a priest be so unwelcoming, officious and doctrinaire at a time when so many friends of the young woman had gathered to mourn her death? It was hard to imagine Jesus citing the house rules in opening remarks to those who had just lost a sister, daughter and companion.