Commentary

Maybe it’s because Halloween is lurking, but I am scared that something creepy is going on in our public schools. I’m referring to the mission creep that is occurring as teachers are asked more and more to add mental health and social-emotional learning to their already grueling workloads. Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore) recently identified school mental health as a priority in the wake of the pandemic. The U.S. surgeon general warns that “the challenges today’s generation of young people face are unprecedented and uniquely hard to navigate. And the effect these challenges have had on their mental health is devastating.” Students’ anxiety, depression and suicide symptoms doubled during the pandemic. The saving grace is the remarkable policy response.

In 2021, nearly eight Marylanders died each day from an overdose. In my city of Baltimore alone, our community lost more than 600 people last year –– a stunningly tragic situation that demands action. These preventable deaths are the consequences of systemic discrimination and suffering rooted in the war on drugs. Decades of police violence and generations of mass incarceration have pushed people who use drugs into the shadows. Our family members, our friends, and our neighbors are disappearing into social and emotional isolation, where they engage in risky behaviors that put their health and that of others at risk. But in Baltimore, we’re charting a new course toward proven solutions to address the overdose crisis and save lives.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “if you want something done, ask a busy person,” to which comedian Lucille Ball later added “the more things you do, the more things you can do.” The point, of course, is that people who stay busy are more energetic, more organized and more motivated by nature. We observed the opposite over two years of monotony and incubation during the pandemic, which resulted in a jump in laziness and less desire for people to get out of their comfort zones. For the first several months of the pandemic, activities were limited, responsibilities at work lessened, and lives constricted. As energy levels declined, anxiety meters rose. In other words, the less you do, the less you do.

When I was growing up on the streets of west Baltimore — where there are no trees to climb — we crawled through dumpsters for fun. In autumn and winter, when the air was crisp and still, we rolled up our sleeves and pushed forward. My father caught me once. Suspended waist-deep in filth, I hadn’t heard the car engine as I closely examined what looked to be a perfectly good box of Captain Crunch. The sound of “Kenny!” shouted from the driver’s side window, shot through me like a slap. A year later we moved to a tiny house on a tree-lined street in the county. It was a revelation.

The big spike in gas utility bills that Maryland residential customers should expect this winter is just the tip of the iceberg. Without major policy changes, customers will see huge increases in their gas bills in the years and decades to come. These looming increases are not because of the cost of gas itself, the source of this winter’s bill hikes, but because of the gas utilities’ massive spending on their local distribution systems — the pipes, concrete, computers, and other infrastructure that utilities use to deliver gas. A report my office is releasing this week shows that the utilities are on track to spend tens of billions of dollars replacing their entire local distribution systems and expanding pipeline capacity, with the state’s largest gas utility this year spending at a rate of more than $1.2 million per day.