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• Photo courtesy of the state of Maryland

The state’s higher education system is failing to move poor, black, and Latino residents toward college degrees, according to a recent University of Pennsylvania Institute for Higher Education study.

Only 33 percent of blacks and 20 percent of Hispanics in Maryland between the ages of 25 and 34 hold at least an associate’s degree, compared to 51 percent of white Marylanders. Meanwhile, degree attainment among Latinos, has been falling, not rising.

In Baltimore City, slightly less than 30 percent of all adults hold at least an associate's degree.

Overall, however, Maryland scores well in terms of college degree attainment, ranking fourth among the states in the percentage (44 percent) of adults who have earned at least an associate degree.

Released last week, the study, “Much Accomplished, Much at Stake: Performance and Policy in Maryland Higher Education,” noted that Maryland has set a goal of increasing the percentage of the adults holding at least an associate’s degree to 55 percent by 2025. But University of Pennsylvania researchers Laura Perna and Joni Finney contend “that will not happen unless the state can reduce its longstanding inequities.”

By 2018, some projections estimate that 66 percent of all jobs in Maryland will require at least some postsecondary education or training, according to the Institute for Research for Higher Education’s website.

The study also noted that although Maryland has tried to hold down higher education costs in recent years, tuition in the state remains well above the national average—a key barrier to making higher education available to more Marylanders. “From 1999 to 2009, tuition rose by 25 percent at the state’s public four-year schools and by 6 percent at its public two-year colleges, while family incomes have remained flat,” according to the report’s executive summary.

Because of the economic downturn, the state has not been able to fully implement the Maryland higher education Funding Commission’s plans to make higher education more affordable, according to the University of Pennsylvania researchers.

The commission established commendable targets, Finney said in a press release accompanying the study, “but these were unrealistic in the face of falling tax revenue.  Unless the state’s leaders can find an approach that works in a weak economy as well as a strong one, higher-education reform in Maryland is in danger of stalling.”

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• Photo courtesy of Share Our Strength

School-age kids need breakfast. That's the message Bryan Voltaggio sent yesterday when he testified in Annapolis in front of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on education and economic development. Members of the Partnership to End Childhood Hunger in Maryland were also present.

Voltaggio, the chef and co-owner of VOLT Restaurant in Frederick, voiced his support for Maryland Meals for Achievement (MMFA), a school breakfast program that provides free breakfast for children in 228 high-need schools. A high-need school is any that participates in the federal School Breakfast Program and has at least 40 percent of its student enrollment approved for free or reduced-price meals.

MMFA grows proportionally with state-allotted funding; the more funding the program receives, the more schools can be enrolled in the program. During his testimony yesterday, Voltaggio said he was "pleased to see that Governor O'Malley included an additional $560,000 in funding for MMFA in his fiscal year 2013 budget," and urged state legislators to approve the funding increase. The additional $560,000 will result in roughly forty-five more schools becoming enrolled in the MMFA program.

According to a fall 2011 report from the Food Research and Action Center, school children "experiencing hunger have lower math scores and are more likely to repeat a grade," and "children who skip breakfast are less able to differentiate among visual images, show increased errors, and have slower memory recall." A poll conducted by the national nonprofit Share Our Strength, which is attempting to end childhood hunger by 2015 through its No Kid Hungry campaign, found that 65 percent of teachers in the U.S. "regularly see kids who come to school hungry because they aren't getting enough to eat at home."

"Simply stated, school nutrition programs provide vital assistance to children and families who may not be able to provide meals at home," said Voltaggio in his testimony. "As a father and as a chef, I feel a responsibility to do what I can to ensure that kids never have to worry where their next meal will come from."

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• Larry Shinagawa, a University of Maryland professor and demographer, chair of the Commission to Study the Impact of Immigrants in Maryland. Photo courtesy of the University of Maryland

Maryland must remain welcoming to immigrants and strengthen its efforts to integrate them into the economy and community, according to a commission coordinated by the University of Maryland.

The Commission to Study the Impact of Immigrants in Maryland found that immigrants “contribute substantially” to the economy and have made considerable contributions to technically skilled industries including the science, information, and medical fields. Its final report, The Impact of Immigrants in Maryland, also found that “relatively unskilled” immigrants play important roles in agriculture, seafood, construction, personal services, and tourism: “Without the influx of foreign-born workers, expansion in these labor-intensive industries would have been choked off, increasing prices and discouraging growth across the economy,” the report reads.

The report also showed that 57 percent of workforce expansion in Maryland between 2000 and 2010 was due to foreign-born workers—far above the national average of 45 percent.

The report evaluated education of the children of immigrants, immigration law enforcement issues, and the federal E-Verify system used to verify workers’ immigration statuses.

The report urged legislators to consider the future benefits of immigration when deciding short-term policies. It describes withholding education and state services from the children of immigrants as “foolhardy,” given that this demographic will one day be a significant part of the labor force in Maryland.

"The panel has adopted a common sense approach that we believe reflects the will of the state," says Commission Chair Larry Shinagawa, a University of Maryland professor and demographer. "We've based our findings on the demographic and economic facts and the legal responsibilities of Maryland's jurisdictions, and we believe our recommendations can help the state leverage global energy and talent to continue as a diverse, prosperous, and dynamic community."

The report also notes that immigration may reduce job opportunities and wages for workers during a cyclical downtown, although research shows that these effects are most concentrated on the opportunities of low-wage-earning immigrants already residing in the United States. There is no specific study that demonstrates the extent of such effects in Maryland.

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• Ron Cassie
• Bicyclists riding in last year's Tour du Port, organized by Bike Maryland. The ride encourages bicyclists to ride on Baltimore City and Baltimore County roads.

According to a couple of recent reports, commuter bicycling in Charm City is making significant strides.

The website Bmorebikes.com, a Baltimore bicycling community blog, reports that the latest round of bicycle counts conducted by the Baltimore City Department of Transportation showed a 137 percent increase in the number of bikes spotted at several major intersections last month compared to a similar period in January 2011. Two-dozen volunteers counted bikes from January 10 through January 12 during morning and evening commuting hours in Fells Point, the Inner Harbor, Midtown, and the Johns Hopkins University areas.

Among the data collected, the City Department of Transportation reported that 17 percent of Baltimore bicycle commuters in those areas counted were female, 67 percent wore a helmet, and the corner of Aliceanna and Boston streets saw the largest increase in bike commuters, up 185 percent over last year.

The City Department of Transportation count comes on the heels of a recent Alliance for Biking & Walking study that ranked Baltimore 11th among major U.S. cities in terms of the percentage of commuter walkers and bicyclers.

"Bicycling and Walking in the United States: 2012 Benchmarking Report," released at the end of January, ranked every state and the fifty-one largest U.S. cities on bicycling and walking levels, safety, funding, and other factors.

"Baltimore is very bikeable," Nate Evans, the city's bicycle and pedestrian planner told the Baltimore Sun. "And it's even more bikeable when you know where to ride."

Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco were the top-ranked cities for the combined percentage of pedestrians and bicyclists.

However, as a whole, Maryland fared lower than Baltimore in the 2012 report, ranking 32nd among the states in terms of the percentage of pedestrians and bicycle commuters.

Across the country, from 2000 to 2009, the number of commuters who bicycle to work increased by 57 percent. The study also revealed potential for tremendous growth in trips made by bicycle. According to the report, 40 percent of all trips in the United States were shorter than two miles. Yet, for 87 percent of trips just one to two miles, Americans choose to drive an automobile. Even more to the point, 62 percent of trips up to just one mile long are made by automobile.

Also according to the Alliance for Biking & Walking study, states spend just 1.6 percent of their federal transportation dollars, or $2.17 per capita, on bicycling and walking infrastructure.

"The Benchmarking Report shows that biking and walking are smart solutions to many of our country's most pressing challenges when it comes to transportation, job creation and health," said Biking & Walking Alliance President and CEO Jeffrey Miller in a press release accompanying the report.

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• James Singewald

After raising more than $5,000 from a successful Kickstarter campaign, photographer James Singewald is now ready to begin an ambitious project to document the historical architectural “gems” of the city through film. The project, which he calls Baltimore: A History, Block by Block, will focus on ten main commercial streets: Howard, Eutaw, Baltimore, Broadway, Fayette, Pennsylvania, Greenmount, North, Monument, and Lexington—all areas that, in their prime, were at the heart of downtown Baltimore, but have since been largely forgotten or neglected.

The project was inspired by and will be similar to Singewald's graduate thesis at the Maryland Institute College of Art: a photo narrative of Old Town Mall that he compiled into a book complete with research about the history of the neighborhood. Though not a Baltimore native himself, Singewald says his great grandfather once had a cigar shop in Old Town Mall. “That’s what brought me down there in the first place,” he says.

The draw of both projects, says Singewald who works part-time in the Imaging Services Department of the Maryland Historical Society, is the possibility of capturing the city at this moment in time as a way to document it. “The city is changing now,” says Singewald, whose job opened his eyes to how drastically these neighborhoods have changed over the past sixty years.

Singewald plans to shoot with a large format 4x5 Calumet Cambo camera and film that over-saturates color to make the buildings pop. “I like to say it sort of brings the buildings back in a way,” he says. He hopes to publish his completed photos in a series of books and also put them on display in galleries located within the photographed neighborhoods. Another Kickstarter campaign may be on the horizon in order to fund publications and gallery exhibitions, he says.

A longstanding fan of Baltimore architecture, Singewald hopes that the photos may help revive interest in the forgotten buildings. “I seek solutions to how to bring these historic places back to life,” writes Singewald on his Kickstarter page. “From past experience, I find that the more I photograph historical locations, the more people become interested in the history of the place.” If the surprising success of his Kickstarter campaign—he earned $800 more than his $4,300 goal in order to purchase film and supplies—is any indication of the public’s support for his cause, then chances are good he’ll do just that.

For more information about Baltimore: A History, Block by Block, visit www.jsingewald.com.

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• Photo courtesy of Power in Dirt

In August, Baltimore launched the Power in Dirt campaign in an attempt to convert the city’s roughly 14,000 vacant lots into community-owned green spaces. The process seemed simple enough: Make it free for a city resident or community organization to adopt an empty lot; fill out an online application form; and then tend to your little slice of urban blight for a year. Now, five months later, the program “has been successful,” according to 25-year-old Christine Kingston, the citywide coordinator for Power in Dirt: At last count, nearly 270 lots have been adopted.

“It’s all people investing their own time and money into spots,” says Kingston. “About one-third [of the lots] are trying to be turned into gardens, meditation spaces, exercise spaces, and sitting areas.”

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• Photo courtesy of Power in Dirt

Power in Dirt is just one piece of the city’s StepUP! Baltimore initiative funded by a Cities of Service Leadership Grant, which Baltimore—along with nine other cities—was awarded in 2010. Shortly after, Vu Dang was hired as the city’s chief service officer; his primary responsibility is to “leverage volunteer service as a strategy to tackle the city’s most pressing challenges.”

This is where Kingston and her three companions—each of whom oversees lot adoptions in Northwest Baltimore, Southwest Baltimore, and East Baltimore, respectively—come in. All four are AmeriCorps VISTA volunteers. AmeriCorps has committed to funding the VISTAs in the StepUP! Baltimore initiative. Power in Dirt will run for three years, after which a decision will be made whether to continue or discontinue the program.

“Most everyone I’ve talked to have been positive toward the program,” says Kingston. The overall goal, she says, is “building sustainable projects.” People who adopt lots have one year to transform a vacant lot into a community green or open space that can also be maintained over the years. Those who do so can renew their adoption papers for up to five years.

Once a project has existed for five years, it can become a part of Baltimore Green Space, a land trust for community-managed open spaces in the city. When that happens, says Kingston, "the land will be a protected green space and you will not have to worry about renewing the adopt-a-lot agreement beyond that point."

Community associations are more likely to adopt lots than individual homeowners, says Kingston, but additional monetary assistance is available for Baltimoreans adopting lots: The Parks and People Foundation offers grants for up to $1,000, and the Chesapeake Bay Trust offers $5,000 grants.

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• Photo courtesy of Power in Dirt

Moreover, Kingston says that having VISTA volunteers involved will make it easier for city residents to adopt lots. “Now that we’re here, we can be the middle man if, say, you need a Bobcat [construction vehicle] to come out,” she says.

While city officials don’t have a projection of when they expect all the vacant lots to be converted, their goal by the one-year anniversary of Power in Dirt is to have one hundred sustainable projects in as many formerly vacant lots around Baltimore.

While projects are in development across the city, the following neighborhoods are those specially targeted by the Power in Dirt campaign: Sandtown-Winchester, Harlem Park, Poppleton, Hollins Market, Franklin Square, Union Square, New Southwest-Mount Clare, Carrollton Ridge, Mill Hill, Shipley Hill, Booth-Boyd, Penrose-Fayette Street Outreach, Rosemont Homeowners Tenants, Park Heights, Broadway East, Greenmount West, Barclay, Oliver, Biddle Street, Middle East, Milton-Montford, Greenspring, Towanda Grantley, and Park Heights

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• Park Heights Community Health Alliance
• Elijah Cummings with members of Henrietta Lacks' familyat the Park Heights Community Health Alliance's new Henrietta Lacks Reading Room.

Ten years ago, the Pimlico branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library shut down. “It was one of five branches that closed that year because of city budget cuts,” said Roswell Encina, director of communications for the Pratt Library, in an e-mail. The next closest library, the Reisterstown branch, was a little more than a mile away—and, until its re-opening last summer, had been closed for three years for renovations.

But Park Heights residents didn’t wait for the re-opening. Instead, they started a book-sharing initiative.

“Everyone should have the opportunity to have a safe place to read and learn,” says Kaleema Breathett, the assistant director of the Park Heights Community Health Alliance, a community-based organization that, in addition to taking the lead on the new book-sharing program, deals with health, wellness, and environmental education.

The book collective—named the Mother Henrietta Lacks Reading Room in honor of Henrietta Lacks, a local Baltimore woman whose “HeLa” cells became the backbone of genetic research—opened in November, but its community programs start February 4. Members will be able to come and read, as well as take part in a host of other events: tutoring, readings for children on Saturday mornings, book signings by local authors, and various film and speakers series.

Located inside the Henry and Jeanette Weinberg Afya Center, the Reading Room’s more than five thousand books were purchased with donations by Congressman Elijah Cummings, the Library of Congress, the Lacks Family, Baltimore Reads, the Book Thing, and Chesapeake Urology.

In the future, Breathett says she hopes to have more library-type materials, including computers and Descriptive Video Services, which the Reading Room is not yet able to provide. However, Park Heights Community Health Alliance is working with the Enoch Pratt Free Library on a plan to borrow the library’s E-readers.

The best part? No membership or fee is required to borrow books. “Our organization is fine with someone owning at least one book they ‘forgot’ to return to our book-share than not having any in their house,” says Breathett about the reading room’s liberal book-sharing policy. “Our partners have made a dedication to keeping our reading room well stocked with used and new books.”

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• Ron Cassie
• Bike Maryland Executive Director Carol Silldorf

Bike Maryland recently announced several key dates for bicycling enthusiasts and advocates, including its annual Maryland State Bicycle Symposium, a free training workshop for its bike ambassador program, and the organization’s first-ever Pro-Bike Lobby Night.

At the Port Discovery Children's Museum on January 25, Bike Maryland will train fifty-plus new Bike-Minded program ambassadors to promote bicycle safety in Baltimore City and throughout the state. Registration for the afternoon or evening training sessions can be found here. Part of a two-year-old partnership with the Maryland State Highway Administration, the ambassador training develops bicycle “educators” in an effort to increase rider, driver, and walker safety, while reducing crash and fatality rates. Bike ambassadors become qualified to host bicycle training workshops at local schools and various Bike Maryland and community events.

Over the last two years, bicycle commuters within Baltimore City alone have increased by 41 percent, according to a press release by Bike Maryland.

“We thought we might get twenty people to sign up and we already have fifty,” Bike Maryland Executive Director Carol Silldorf told Urbanite last week. “I’m so excited, this is the first time in Baltimore this number of people are being trained to teach bike safety.” Silldorf added that Katie Gore, of Joe’s Bike Shop, and former national mountain biking champion, Marla Streb, will serve as trainers for would-be local bike ambassadors.

This year’s 15th Annual Maryland State Bicycle Symposium in the Miller Senate Building in Annapolis is slated for February 22. Tentatively scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m., the free, day-long symposium brings together state and county government officials and planners, elected leaders, community and transportation activists, and bike enthusiasts of all stripes from the region to discuss ways to improve local and state bikeability. This year’s topics include Bike Maryland's legislative agenda, bike-share initiatives, the Bike-Friendly Maryland Program, the Bike-Minded program, bicycle tourism, and the new Maryland Bikeways program.

“We already have fifteen speakers. We have a fabulous agenda and expect to have four-hundred people,” Silldorf said. She added with a laugh: “Although we have a history of big snow storms [on the day of the symposium] in past years.”

This year’s first-ever Pro-Bike Lobby Night will be held February 6 in the House Office Building in Annapolis. Due to limited space, interested participants must register by contacting Christina Nutile, Silldorf said. Bike Maryland, which has twenty-thousand members statewide, will offer a mini, twenty-minute training session for those who wish meet with their legislators to briefly discuss biking-related issues.

“There’s been such a demand [for a lobby event],” Silldorf said. “People want to learn how to become advocates because bicycling is an issue they care about. They want to be able to meet their legislators to make their voice heard.”

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• Ken Light

Journalist and sustainable food advocate Michael Pollan walked onstage at the Meyerhoff on Tuesday, looking lanky and pointy-eared as ever, carrying fistfuls of plastic grocery bags from Safeway.

He rifled through the plastic bags, pulling out one food item after another. First, Reese’s Puffs: breakfast cereal that evolved out of a chocolate candy. Not surprisingly, the cereal is 30 percent sugar by weight, and yet across the top, the banner “WHOLE GRAIN” mistakenly advertises the product as health food. The audience laughed loudly, eagerly—like teenagers privy to an inside joke—as Pollan continued to hold up his supermarket finds, which each betray a false sense of healthiness and a lengthy ingredient list full of unpronounceable chemicals.

Pollan’s show and tell would have felt condescending—fancy food guy from produce-happy Berkeley dissing Baltimore’s supermarkets!—if his message weren’t so right on, and if the Baltimore Safeway he visited weren’t so representative of every darn supermarket in America.

“America is suffering from a national eating disorder,” Pollan said. It’s called “orthorexia,” and it means “an unhealthy obsession with healthy food.” We have become so obsessed with what’s in (and not in) our food—Low carb! High fiber! Low fat! Omega 3s! Antioxidants!—that we have forgotten about the food itself. One of the “edible, food-like substances” (his own term) that Pollan held up was called simply “FiberPlus Antioxidants.” Though named solely after its nutrients, it appeared to have been a cereal. Or a cereal bar. Or something.

“Who among us has ever beheld a nutrient?” Pollan asked. When you talk about a food in the context of its nutrients, Pollan said, “You give power to the scientists.

“It’s a little like religion,” he said. “We rely on a priesthood to negotiate our relationship with the divine,” just as we now rely on scientists to make sense of nutrition—a science, Pollan explained, that we know shockingly little about. Consider the “low fat” era, Pollan said, in which the U.S. government convinced people that vegetable-based shortening (like margarine) was better for us than butter. A handful of years later, the evil trans fat—an essential element of margarine—was discovered to be even more lethal than the unhealthy animal fat in butter. “Nutrition science is kind of where surgery was in 1650,” he said.

Then there was the especially timely piece of news that America’s most unapologetic butter lover, television cooking personality Paula Deen, has been diagnosed with Type II diabetes. Deen admitted to having the disease on Tuesday on the Today show.

“I think this will go down as a red letter day,” Pollan said. “She has Type II diabetes, and the way she’s talking about it is very troubling.” Deen only went public with the news of her disease (which she’s had for two years) after making an endorsement deal with diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk.

“The message she’s sending is you don’t have to change your diet, you just have to take the right drug.”

Pollan’s ideas are nothing new. He’s been in the public eye (or at least the New York Times Magazine-reading, Whole Foods-shopping, reusable bag-toting public’s eye) since his critically acclaimed book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was published in 2006. Pollan has other books in which he explores our culture’s twisted relationship with food—and nearly three years after the publication of his last book, Food Rules (Penguin Press, 2009), one can grow tired of his schtick. At the same time, we’re worse off than ever, with rates of obesity and the chronic illnesses that arise from it showing no signs of falling. So maybe instead of drilling for new material, Pollan needs to continue to drive his point home.

It is inherently frustrating, however, to hear a figure like Pollan, who has a lot of legitimate knowledge to share with the city as a whole, speak to a majority white, wealthy audience. (The first was my own observation; the second is an assumption made based on the price of a subscription to the Baltimore Speakers Series, which starts at $265.) It felt, through much of the lecture, like Pollan was preaching to the choir. Not until a host of audience-posed questions asked about the realities of low-income communities being able to find and afford healthy food did Pollan address the issue.

Echoing sentiments like Mark Bittman’s, Pollan started his response debunking the myth that junk food really is cheaper. “Real food is cheaper than processed foods. It’s the convenience you’re paying for … If people are willing to prepare their food, you can eat healthier on a budget.” And, citing an experiment he and his family conducted where they microwaved individual dinners for themselves, “It’s not always such a time bargain. It took a really long time to microwave all those meals, and it involved 20 minutes of standing around feeling useless in the kitchen.”

“People like the people in this room can afford meat from happy animals, and other people can’t. Look at the way we subsidize food. Relative to real food, to fruits and vegetables, the price of soda has been going down while the price of fruits and vegetables has been going up. If you’re in the market for calories, you’ll gravitate to those center aisles. We need to change policy.”

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• J.M. Giordano

Photographs in this story were taken by staff photographer Joe Giordano during the first day of the Schools Not Jails protest on Monday, January 16.

“You know you’re a problem in this city if you’re a black male, even before you know what a prison is, based on what you’ve been taught,” said Lawrence Grandpre against a backdrop of chain-link fence and five state police squad cars. Around him stood about sixty protestors, who had gathered again Tuesday night on the sidewalks of Baltimore to continue their opposition to the proposed 180-bed juvenile detention facility. Grandpre was there, along with several compatriots of the Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, conducting a teach-in on what they believe the youth jail represents.

Tuesday was the second day of the planned five-day occupation of the youth jail site, which sits at 600 East Monument Street. Dubbed the Schools Not Jails Occupation and organized by members of Occupy Baltimore and the Baltimore Algebra Project, the five-day protest was planned to raise “awareness of how and where our public money is spent," according to the group's website.

According to Kate Khatib, one of the Schools Not Jails organizers, the proposed youth jail site was considered as the original site of the Occupy Baltimore encampment.

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• J.M. Giordano
• City police in riot gear

Although police presence was quite visible—nine officers on foot and a Baltimore City Police van assembled on the corner of East Monument and Forrest Streets—no demonstrators at Tuesday night’s protest were arrested. The six protestors arrested Monday evening had been released that morning, and several of them were at Tuesday’s gathering, which began with a 6 p.m. dinner followed by the LBS teach-in at 7. According to Maryland State Police spokesperson Greg Shipley, each of the six protestors arrested Monday were charged with two trespassing-related violations. Some were still processing the events from the previous day, which included a visit from about twenty city police suited up in riot gear.

“Police always write the rules that they want,” said 39-year-old Mike McGuire, a self-described veteran street activist. McGuire was one of the six arrested Monday evening. “They [police] bring it [riot gear] out for residents who say we want you to build schools, not jails.”

“That’s just officer safety protocol,” said Baltimore City Police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi in a phone interview. “That doesn’t mean that those officers will engage people. That’s just to make sure that the officers don’t get hurt.” He added that relations between the Occupy protestors and the city have been “extremely diplomatic.”

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• J.M. Giordano

“They’re more than welcome to demonstrate at places in the city,” he said. “They just have to abide by basic laws.”

Schools Not Jails is the latest in a series of protests against the proposed juvenile detention center—which would hold between 180 and 230 beds and cost $100 million—that successfully postponed its construction, originally intended to begin fall 2010. Last fall, during a “Rethink Schools, Rethink the Baltimore Youth Jail” march in October, Heber Brown, the pastor at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church, said that any talk of constructing a new youth jail is really “talking about locking up more black youth.” In May 2011, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency issued a report stating that the size of the jail could be cut back by nearly a half, to 117 beds; by that date, roughly $14 million had already been spent on “planning, design, demolition, and site preparation,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

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• J.M. Giordano

According to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Maryland is projected to have a budget shortfall—the degree to which a state’s “revenues fall short of the cost of providing services”—of $1 billion in fiscal year 2013, in addition to its shortfall of $1.4 billion in fiscal year 2012.

On Wednesday afternoon, Maryland State Delegate Mary Washington informed Brown on his Facebook page that "there are no state funds allocated for the 'Baltimore City Detention Center--Youth Detention Facility' under the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Service[s] Capital Budget for 2013."

"We stalled it now for two years and it’s a great victory, but the goal is to get it scrapped altogether," said Brown in an interview Wednesday evening.

“I’m not against building the jail, but I don’t think you need a huge, two-hundred-person jail,” said City Councilman Carl Stokes in an interview Tuesday afternoon. Stokes, whose District 12 would be the home of the proposed detention center, thinks that city money should be directed toward “positive interventions.”

“If the money were redirected into good education, into youth opportunities, into jobs, then the wasted dollars of jailing good people would stop,” he said. Stokes also said he thought the state could have handled the teach-in encampment on Monday night differently. “There’s no reason to arrest people for civil disobedience that’s peaceful and respectful and really makes a point. There’s nothing else going on, on that land.”

On Monday night, after protestors had set up a tent on the sidewalk along one side of Forrest Street, Baltimore City Police SWAT teams moved protestors to the opposite side of the street so that city workers could tear down the tent. And camping on the actual location of the youth jail, inside the fence, is out of the question.

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• J.M. Giordano

But the fact that the site of the youth jail is on state-owned land didn’t deter Gregg Hill, a 19-year-old with the Baltimore Algebra Project, from marching inside the fence Monday evening and helping construct a makeshift school building, something that eventually led to his arrest.

“At a certain point, you wanna be seen taking a stand,” he said. “I’m willing to risk anything in order to bring those changes about.”

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