Two years into the popular $4.4 billion-a-year Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, educators in every school district are finding their priorities reordered, sometimes in ways they hadn’t expected.

The nearly 100 Harford County Public School students who signed up to take the Advanced Placement African American Studies next school year will have to find a new class.

Carey Wright spent decades in Maryland as an educator, but she’s most known for her nine years as state superintendent in Mississippi, where students transformed their academic performances in both math and reading before she left in June 2022.

Local school budgets are in turmoil, class sizes are rising or lowering, and superintendents are under pressure to figure it out fast. The general reaction: Wait, this is what the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future means?

The three-story homes on Biddle Street, boarded up, blistered and blighted, may not look very different from their neighbors up and down the street. But pretty soon, they’ll take on a new purpose in the neighborhood.