Commentary

Identifying and nurturing the gifted and talented child is one of the most difficult jobs in education today — and one of the most controversial, as well. Who is gifted? In what way? Why are fewer children of color or underprivileged children chosen to receive the additional benefits of accelerated or broadened educational programs?

“The doors of the church are open.” That’s how the Rev. Grady A. Yeargin Jr. ended almost every one of the hundreds of sermons I heard him preach at the City Temple of Baltimore (Baptist), the Bolton Hill church I attended for half my life. Technically, that meant Sunday’s lessons were now ready to be carried from inside the walls of the building into the world. But if you knew “Rev,” as the kids who grew up at City Temple called him, you knew that openness started with him.

The billboard shows what looks like a young woman’s hands tied with rope. The words written over the image state “It happens here.” I saw the billboard across the street from a motel in Wicomico County, Maryland, where I met 40-plus migrant seasonal farmworkers from Mexico on H2A visas working on farms in Maryland. The horror of human trafficking, farmworkers tell me, can be true. It is not just about sex trafficking.

For nearly 2 1/2 hours Monday night, on the fourth floor auditorium at the National Federation of the Blind headquarters in South Baltimore, representatives of MCB Real Estate — including managing partner P. David Bramble — pitched their plan to tear down the Harborplace pavilions and replace them with four new, much taller buildings. Whether they changed a lot of minds in the crowd of about 200 people isn’t clear; more than a few seemed skeptical, particularly of the size and scale of the project, with its estimated $400 million in public investment required.

It is a busy time to be a data analyst in the Maryland Transit Administration. They’ve likely been working overtime crunching numbers for the anticipated revival of the Red Line. You’ll recall, that’s the east-west Baltimore light rail project that was deep-sixed by Gov. Larry Hogan but is expected to make a return — in some form — under Gov. Wes Moore. What if it’s a rapid transit bus? What if tunnels are or aren’t dug?