Commentary

Every day, more than 650,000 children in Maryland ride to school on a school bus powered by diesel fuel. Approximately one in 10 of these children suffer from asthma — a leading cause of school absenteeism — and this asthma rate is higher among minority groups. Studies have shown that a child riding inside of a diesel school bus may be exposed to as much as 15 times the level of toxic diesel exhaust as someone riding in a car.

For all of this week’s focus on Donald Trump’s legal travails — and the breathless commentary and speculation surrounding it from all quarters — there was significantly less ink spilled on what looms as a far more consequential development, at least in the long-term and for average Americans contemplating a secure retirement. The annual evaluation of the financial condition of Social Security and Medicare, released last Friday, outlined how both remain in deep financial trouble with the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund hurtling toward depletion in 2033, which is one year earlier than expected.

Last week, while hundreds of workers gathered outside the Maryland State House, Maryland legislators quietly completed a legislative betrayal that abandons Maryland workers in favor of corporate CEOs. The Senate Finance Committee voted 5-3 against workers’ interests by eliminating labor peace agreements as a condition of licensure in the emerging cannabis industry in Maryland.

The Maryland General Assembly will wrap up April 10, meaning that potential state laws have one week to get passed. But two bills with important tenant protections stand a strong chance of becoming law and would do a lot of good to make lives better for renters in Montgomery County and the rest of Maryland. HB691, the Tenant Safety Act, passed the House by a decisive margin and reforms the rent escrow process. Rent escrow is where tenants pay their rent into a court controlled fund, rather than to a landlord, to legally withhold rent due to failure to make appropriate repairs to a building.

Our country has a long tradition, dating at least back more than 150 years to the Civil War, of trying to take care of our veterans. Sometimes we do better, and sometimes we fall short, but generally, we try. The goal was first enunciated by the greatest articulator of the American ideal, President Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, with these memorable phrases: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

I read with keen interest the MoCo 360 article on Feb. 27 spotlighting the role of the Black dollar and Black-owned businesses in Montgomery County, highlighting the work of the Montgomery County Economic Development Corp. (MCEDC). Gov. Wes Moore (D) campaigned on initiatives related to increased minority business, then revealed in his first budget funding that will support the pillars to create a more competitive and equitable economy.

Our public schools remain highly segregated along racial and socioeconomic lines, with more than one-third of U.S. students attending schools considered to be segregated, according to a recent analysis. How does school segregation like this continue 69 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education? The answer is one school board decision at a time. One such decision is currently before the Baltimore County School Board.