The state’s income threshold for families to qualify for free pre-kindergarten should be increased by more than 60%, a state workgroup told a legislative panel Tuesday. The Joint Committee on Children, Youth and Families, weighing universal schooling for 4-year-olds acknowledged, the need for an increase in funding for the early education program statewide. Maryland’s Kirwan Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education has also tentatively agreed to recommend universal pre-K.
The following laws approved by the Maryland General Assembly this year go into effect on Sunday Oct. 1, 2017. The list contains bill numbers and links to the legislation and legislative history.
Legislators learned last week that Maryland’s electronic balloting system may need better security measures to protect voters’ information and that the lawmakers must be the ones to add those protections. The State Board of Elections told lawmakers Sept. 6 that they are powerless to make those changes, and that any security changes must directly come from the legislature.
As the summer tourism season comes to a close in Ocean City, Maryland, many businesses fear they may soon lose much of their seasonal workforce if the Trump administration cancels the J-1 visa program. The White House may be considering reducing the J-1 visa exchange visitor program, which brings in more than 100,000 students from foreign countries to the U.S. each summer, often to work in tourist destinations like Ocean City
This is the last part of a five-part series on the divide between rural Maryland and the rest of the state. People are dying faster than they’re being replaced in rural Maryland, and where they’re not the numbers are trending that way. So retaining residents and attracting new ones is vital, and cities like Salisbury, Frederick and Cumberland — small urban anchors in Maryland’s rural areas — could be where the revitalization begins.
This is the fourth in a five-part series about the divide between rural Maryland and the rest of the state. The old economic mainstays of crop farming, raising chickens and catching fish and crabs provide jobs and preserve the Eastern Shore’s character, but all three industries face economic pressures that make their future uncertain.
This is the third part in a five-part series about the divide between rural Maryland and the rest of the state. Unlike Western Maryland and Eastern Shore counties, which are starved for growth, Harford, Carroll and Frederick are trying to ensure their farming heritage doesn’t become a casualty of their recent economic success and decades-long population growth.
This is the second part in a five-part series examining the divide between rural Maryland and the rest of the state. Allegany and Garrett, the state’s two westernmost counties, tend to be lumped together as “Mountain Maryland,” their problems similar, their prospects equally muddled. But the two counties’ economic issues — and their approaches to solving them — differ starkly.
The first in a five-part series in the divide between rural Maryland and the rest of the state. Earlier this year when Gov. Larry Hogan took the stage in Annapolis at P.A.C.E., a conference dedicated to Western Maryland, he opened with the following: “When I was sworn in two years ago, I said the war on rural Maryland was over — and I meant what I said.”
At least 138 pedestrians have been struck by vehicles in the past eight years on a lethal two-mile stretch of state highway that runs through Langley, Park Md., a low-income immigrant community in the Washington suburbs. Eight have died. A Capital News Service analysis of state accident data from 2009 through 2016 documented the casualties on University, a roadway that officials say wasn’t designed for the largely immigrant walking community now living along it in Prince George’s County. (It’s a long story, but worth the slog comparing what happened in College Park with what has not happened in Langley Park.)
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