Latest news with #Marylanders
Yomiuri Shimbun
14-07-2025
- Business
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Maryland Aims to Help Former Fed Workers Find Jobs — and Ease Teacher Shortages
For years, Scott Neilitz conducted analyses for a nongovernmental organization to assess the impact of its efforts. It was a job he was passionate about, but he was laid off this year as the Trump administration cut the federal workforce and funding. Neilitz tried applying for other positions in the nonprofit sector, but he found himself competing with thousands of qualified workers for the same posting. Now, he's enrolled in a program at Montgomery College that is helping him earn a teacher's license, in hopes of becoming a middle school math instructor in a few months. Neilitz is one of the thousands of former federal workers whom Maryland officials are trying to help find new careers – an effort they say could also help address an ongoing teacher shortage. The state had more than 1,600 teaching vacancies as of mid-March, according to data released the next month. The federal government typically has been the state's largest employer, but data shows that over 1,000 former federal workers filed for unemployment from November to March. This year, Gov. Wes Moore (D) ordered state agencies to support former federal employees in finding new careers. The Maryland State Department of Education began working to develop a tool to help people search for teacher preparation programs. And in May, the Maryland Higher Education Commission announced $1 million in grants to 11 colleges and universities to help former federal employees receive teacher training and licenses. 'We refuse to stand idly by while the new federal administration fires public servants without cause and are doing everything in our power to put Marylanders first,' Moore said in a statement announcing the grant money. 'This funding helps our federal workers land on their feet, while also addressing the teacher shortage throughout our state.' Montgomery College was one of the grant recipients, receiving money to support its Alternative Certification for Effective Teachers program for people who have a bachelor's or higher-level degree in a non-education-related specialty but want to make a career change. The program, which has been around for two decades, partners directly with Montgomery County Public Schools to find people whose expertise align with the district's critical shortage areas, like STEM-related teaching jobs and foreign language instructors. Its participants are required to have a bachelor's degree with at least a 3.0 GPA or pass a content expertise exam. The program was updated to accommodate former federal workers looking to find a job on an accelerated timeline, said Glenda Hernandez Tittle, Montgomery College's senior program director for alternative certification programs. About 20 people will participate. Typically, the program involves six months of instruction, career coaching and student teaching. But some members of the most recent cohort – which started in June and was full of former federal employees – already have conditional contracts with the local school system. 'Our long-standing relationship with Montgomery College naturally evolved into this innovative program, which is bringing talented former federal workers into teaching,' schools spokeswoman Liliana López said in an email. 'We look forward to them sharing their diverse experiences, helping us staff critical shortage areas like computer science and world languages, and enriching our students' learning.' She said some members of the cohort will start teaching on the first day of the upcoming school year, which is Aug. 26. Enough people were interested in the Montgomery College teaching certification program that it was expanded to offer two cohorts; another group of former federal employees will start in August. The cohorts have many candidates with PhDs, Hernandez Tittle said, and include a few medical doctors, a former deputy counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency and a few cancer researchers. 'The expertise that these people bring to the classroom is amazing,' Hernandez Tittle said. Neilitz, 39, last worked for the National Democratic Institute as the regional lead for the Eurasia region, but the nonprofit cut about 1,000 positions after the Trump administration effectively cut funding for foreign aid. He said he was drawn to Montgomery College's program because it aligns with his lifelong passion for public service. He grew up in a family of educators and briefly taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan. While his previous occupation focused on 'bringing American values to the rest of the world,' he said he's now focused on bringing that passion to a different group of people: Maryland youths. So far, he said he's learned more through the program about how students develop neurologically and emotionally, as well as how to build effective lesson plans with a clear objective. And though he plans to become a middle school math teacher, he is also being trained on how to teach literacy. Neilitz is already applying for some openings in Montgomery schools. He later hopes to become certified to teach foreign languages and work with English learners – two critical shortage areas in the county. 'The plan right now is to start off with a middle school math, get a few more certifications to figure out what is really that age level in that field that I feel super comfortable with,' Neilitz said. 'In 10 years … maybe there's a way to use those monitoring and evaluation skills I used to have with MCPS or the Maryland State Department of Education.'
Politico
10-07-2025
- Business
- Politico
Congress thrusts FBI headquarters feud into September government funding fight
Marylanders in Congress made their first move Thursday inside the Senate Appropriations Committee to use this year's government funding bills to pinch the Trump administration for abandoning the longtime plan to move the FBI's headquarters to their home state. After a decadelong competition between leaders in Maryland and Virginia, the suburban town of Greenbelt was chosen in 2023 for the bureau's new campus. But the Trump administration officially ditched that plan this month, leaving about $1.4 billion in a construction account set aside for the relocation project. Now Chris Van Hollen , Maryland's senior senator and a top appropriator, wants to use this year's government funding process to fight the Trump administration's move. He notched his first victory Thursday morning during the Appropriations Committee's markup of the bill that funds the FBI, when members voted 15-14 on his amendment to block the Trump administration from using the construction cash for anything besides building a new FBI headquarters at the previously selected site. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) joined Democrats in supporting the bid. Allowing Trump to 'snatch' money that Congress has set aside for something lawmakers have mandated serves to undercut Congress' funding power under Article I of the Constitution, Van Hollen told his colleagues: 'Today it's the FBI headquarters, tomorrow it could be any project anywhere in the country.' But the longtime tug-of-war over relocating the FBI is expected to continue over the next 12 weeks, as lawmakers and the Trump administration scuffle over the broader plan for funding the government by the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline.
Observer
09-07-2025
- Business
- Observer
Musk's third party starts with a good idea
Elon Musk has finally done something predictable (for a gazillionaire with a political itch, that is): He says he's launching a third party devoted to the cause of deficit reduction. Instead of the quadrennial dream of No Labels, in which high-minded donors put up the money for an imaginary white knight who never materialises, we may get the 'America Party", in which the world's richest man puts his fortune behind, he says, 'extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield.' If you parse Musk's postings and re-postings, that seems to mean a third party strategy that targets a handful of close Senate and House seats, trying to create a legislative faction that exerts control over both bodies by preventing anything from passing without their crucial votes. Credit where due: This is a somewhat better plan than just backing a doomed third-party presidential bid in 2028. The most compelling suggestion for would-be third partyers during Joe Biden's presidency was that they should persuade a clutch of discontented senators to caucus as independents, creating a potent Joe Manchin-Mitt Romney-Lisa Murkowski-Susan Collins-Kyrsten Sinema bloc. Before the travails of the Department of Government Efficiency, I would have said that it was a mistake to automatically bet against Musk; now it seems safer to just acknowledge up front that this plan is unlikely to work out and that Musk will probably find it too difficult to seriously pursue. But in the spirit of possibility, and because the House-and-Senate plan is an advance on most third-party fantasias, let's consider the things that would need to happen for Musk to succeed. First, the America Party couldn't just target the tightest swing states. You'll notice that of the independent-minded senators and former senators listed above, only Sinema comes from a hotly contested state, Arizona. That's because under polarised conditions, a true swing state is usually the place where both parties make the strongest efforts at persuasion, where the stakes of each election seem highest and the fear of the other party's rule is sharpest among partisans on either side. Whereas a more reliably blue or red state is more likely to feature a persistent exasperation with the ruling party even among its own registered supporters or an eccentric form of politics that doesn't have any place to go in a normal two-party presidential election. These tendencies explain not just the resilience of politicians like Collins, but also how you get popular Republican governors in typically Democratic states and vice versa: A vote for Larry Hogan in Maryland or Andy Beshear in Kentucky is a way to express discontent with one-party rule without giving aid and comfort to the national version of the rival party. A reasonable goal, then, for the America Party would be to convince more Kentuckians or Marylanders that they could do the same thing with their Senate votes — that they could safely send an independent senator to Washington without effectively empowering Donald Trump or Chuck Schumer. But to pull that off, you need not just posturing but trust, and that's hard to build from scratch. In 2010, it was easier for Murkowski to run and win as a write-in candidate after she lost a Republican primary in Alaska because she was already a known quantity. In 2018, it was easier for Romney to run and win as a heterodox Republican in Utah. So the second challenge for the America Party would be to find recruits who bring their credibility with them — who could plausibly start at a 15 per cent to 20 per cent floor and build toward the necessary plurality, rather than needing to spend a fortune just to achieve any position in the polls. But for that kind of recruitment to work, you would also need the party to achieve some distance from the brand of its progenitor and funder. A successful script for the America Party would probably need to be deliberately vague, promising compromise on every front (in ways that would infuriate pundits, of course) while constantly defining itself in the negative, against the woke left and the MAGA right. But Musk himself is associated both with extremely specific cuts to government programmes and with full-throated MAGA rhetoric. Somehow the America Party would need to be Musk-funded without being Muskian. It would need to be perceived as something he had set in motion but declined to micromanage, with its successful candidates as its natural leaders rather than the Tesla king himself. And his funding would need to have a longer time horizon than just the 2026 and 2028 races; electing even one senator in those cycles would be impressive, and the goal would be to shape America in the 2030s, not to upend Trump's second term. Musk is good at making long-term bets on fronts where naysayers expect swift failure. He's not good at being hands-off or in the background, and on the evidence of the last six months, he's terrible at intuiting what swing voters want. So the test of his third-party ambitions will be whether he can demonstrate a new facility: accepting his own limits and learning from defeat. — The New York Times Ross Douthat, Douthat, a NYT columnist, writes on religion, politics, and society
Technical.ly
09-07-2025
- Business
- Technical.ly
Technical.ly expands to cover all of Maryland's innovation economy
first expansion was to Baltimore, both because we saw the startup and tech ecosystem growing and because I didn't own a car and the trains ran frequently there from where I lived. Over the next 14 years, we would hold our first team retreat in Ocean City, the newsroom fridge would be perpetually stocked with Natty Boh and several of our longest tenured teammates would be Marylanders. Our Baltimore coverage, and later our DC coverage, would often overlap many of the two dozen Maryland counties. But the identity was first and foremost with those major cities. Today that changes as we grow our regional coverage. Thanks to Report for America, our lead ecosystem sponsor TEDCO and several other contributors, is now reporting across Maryland. Led by longtime editor Sameer Rao, with the help of brand new lead Maryland reporter Maria Eberhart, alongside lead reporter Kaela Roeder, now has a three-person, full-time, dedicated news team covering high-growth entrepreneurship, jobs of the future and tech's civic impact — from digital equity to the effects of AI policy. We'll supplement this with thoughtful guest commentary and our growing creator strategy. The newsroom is open to story ideas, including suggestions about the people who represent this innovation economy, the programs and companies they're building and how the larger trends that affect this work are playing out locally (keep sending pitches to baltimore@ And as part of the Baltimore News Collaborative, we also regularly partner with other local news organizations. Fresh research helps us demonstrate that our work matters. 'ecosystem storytelling' results in more follow-on coverage of these topics (including other local media, and national and industry) and contributes to a better connected and faster-growing economy. Storytelling isn't an output of a healthier economy, it's an input. Within our statewide coverage, our stories will still tilt toward Baltimore, where we're helped by the financial support of the Abell Foundation and the Deutsch Foundation, while support from the Howard County Economic Development Authority will underscore coverage of that region, an economic engine and home to the Maryland Innovation Center. In today's media environment, we can no longer assume good work will lead to good storytelling and the attention that follows. We need your help. To support our expanded Maryland coverage, read more about our services here. Our financial partners are ensuring their region's innovation story is told. Make sure yours is, too.
Business Wire
02-07-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Maryland Tech Council Launches Rural Technology Network to Accelerate Rural Innovation
ROCKVILLE, Md.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Maryland Tech Council (MTC), the largest technology and life sciences trade association in the state, today announced the launch of the Rural Technology Network, a new initiative to accelerate growth in rural Maryland's technology ecosystem. The Rural Technology Network will strengthen economic growth in rural Maryland through strategic business development and by offering companies enhanced access to networking, cost savings, education, mentorship and other resources. It also seeks to foster partnerships between the private sector, educational institutions, and local governments to enhance commercialization and grow the pipeline of local businesses and talent. The Network will host inaugural events in Summer 2025. 'As a physician who has conducted research, I understand the benefits innovation can bring to patients while also promoting startup formation and growing our economy,' said Congressman Andy Harris, MD (MD-01). 'Small businesses employ the majority of workers in the 1st congressional district. The Rural Technology Network will give the most innovative entrepreneurs in rural Maryland a new way to connect, grow, and create good-paying jobs for Marylanders.' 'Rural Maryland has all the assets needed to be a top technology ecosystem – a deep pool of industry talent, low cost of doing business, and strong research base,' said Kelly Schulz, Chief Executive Officer of the Maryland Tech Council. 'We created the Rural Technology Network to build a unified voice for the rural technology ecosystem, strengthen ties between industry and research institutions, and enable entrepreneurs to achieve their biggest ambitions right here in Maryland.' "We are very excited to announce our participation in the new Rural Technology Network in Western Maryland,' said Richard Police, Director, Business Development of Clym Environmental Services, LLC. 'We are proudly headquartered in Frederick, and are also proud to be opening a new environmentally friendly regulated waste processing facility in Frostburg that will be the only one of its kind in the United States. We look forward to helping to expand and support the burgeoning technology sector in Western Maryland through the Rural Technology Network." 'Biotechnology companies are discovering the unique advantages of locating in rural areas like Maryland's Eastern Shore—lower operating costs, access to agricultural supply chains, and a strong sense of community,' said Mike Thielke, Executive Director of the Eastern Shore Entrepreneurship Center (ESEC). 'The Rural Technology Network would play a vital role in supporting the infrastructure, talent connections, and pilot-scale capabilities these companies need to thrive." Rural Maryland is a rapidly growing technology innovation hub. The Eastern Shore is home to emerging leaders in agritech, aquaculture, information technology, and aerospace, and Western Maryland hosts leaders in biotechnology, regenerative medicine, cyber security, and agritech. To learn more about the Rural Technology Network and how to become a member of the Maryland Tech Council, organizations in Western Maryland may contact westernmdrtn@ and organizations on the Eastern Shore may contact easternshorertn@ The Maryland Tech Council (MTC) is a collaborative community that is actively engaged in building strong technology and life science industries by supporting the efforts of our individual members. We are the largest technology and life sciences trade association in the state of Maryland, and we provide value by giving members a forum to learn, share, and connect. MTC brings the region's community together into a single, united organization that empowers our members to achieve their business goals through advocacy, networking and education. The vision for the Maryland Tech Council is to propel Maryland to become the number one innovation economy for life sciences and technology in the country. For more information:
