Commentary

In the end, Shannon Moyer McNeil could do nothing to save her children. The Northern Virginia mother lost her daughter Waverly just after she turned 12 and her son Oliver three years later, just before his 12th birthday. Both children were diagnosed with a rare genetic condition called Sanfilippo syndrome. “November and December are challenging times for my family,” McNeil, who lives in Alexandria, told me recently. Within those months, she explained, fall the dates of her children’s births and deaths.

When the Maryland General Assembly meets in 2024, legislators will have the opportunity to enhance language proficiency, education and immigrant justice. They can do so in a cost-effective manner by passing the Credit for All Language Learning Act to ensure higher education institutions in our state value our students’ and colleagues’ hard work in English language learning classes equally with comparable work in college world languages classes.

What will it take for the interim state superintendent Carey Wright to live up to her advance billing, especially as a miracle worker for raising the reading proficiency of schoolchildren in Mississippi? Of course, Dr. Wright is quick to point out that it was no miracle, just a lot of hard work. What’s also crucial to understand is that the hard work – the recipe for success – is not some secret sauce. Educators know the instruction and teacher preparation that are essential.

I have been reading with great interest the lively commentary to David Plymyer’s excellent piece about proposed projects at Harborplace and Camden Yards and the need for urban design and community engagement. I would like to add my perspective as former chairman of the Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA) and one who was part of the discussion of a comprehensive, transformative vision for these and many other developments underway in downtown Baltimore.

It’s beginning to look a lot like the holiday season in Frederick. The cold snap this week gave us a preview of winter. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or something else with your family and friends, you know what’s coming. Frederick is a great place to enjoy the festivities of December. The city is all aglow in lights, from the historic district downtown to the shopping centers to the north, south, east and west of the city, to the smaller towns and cities around the county. Homeowners are decorating, as are business owners.

I came to Baltimore as a medical student in 1995 in the midst of a raging deadly syndemic of substance use (heroin and crack cocaine), syphilis, hepatitis C and HIV infection. Toward the end of my four years of medical school, early, effective antiretroviral treatment “cocktails” became available, and the near certainty of death became less the norm and more an exception. For nearly two decades as an adult and pediatric infectious diseases specialist, I have provided HIV care to a majority Black patient population, spanning from infants to seniors, in Baltimore.

My old friend Calvert Bregel, gone 12 years now, used to treat me to trips on his great boat, the Miss Demeanor, to fish for Chesapeake striped bass — rockfish, as they are known around here — and we had many merry times on the bay. With Bill Burton, who was for decades the outdoors writer of the bygone Evening Sun, we caught lots of fish and released most. Now and then, we took a rockfish home for supper, but the idea was more camaraderie than consumption.