This meeting of the Annapolis City Council featured two major segments: an annual update from Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) leadership and a press conference announcing the release of FEMA funding for the City Dock resilience project. The transcript also includes public service announcements and a brief presentation on the Golden Pass parking program. The meeting included remarks from Board of Education member Joanna Tobin, Superintendent Dr. Bedell, Mayor Jared Littman, County Executive Stuart Pittman, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Congresswoman Sarah Elfrith, Congressman John Sarbanes, and Maryland Emergency Management Secretary Russ Strickland.
Hey, get out of here. Looks like I have to do proper trash placement and training again. If you put your trash out, please place it into a bag. And tie the bag up and place it to a water type receptacle with your address placed on it so they can be seen from the street at the end of your property for proper road collection. As a matter of fact, this recycle is done all wrong also. If you decide to place your recycling in a bag, please bring your bag to the receptacle and take all items out of the bag and place them into the can. And make sure the lid is closed, please. Let's bring back getting the trash monster so I can show you things that are not recyclable. See, 40% non recyclable right now. Please be mindful of your trash and recycle placement to avoid fines. Good. Okay. All right, you're good. Thank you. All right, good afternoon, everyone. I'm Joanna Tobin. I represent uh District Six on the Board of Education, which is includes the city of Annapolis within that district, and I have represented this district since twenty twenty. Presentation here, and we're looking forward to giving you all the annual update on our progress. So I know I keep looking at that screen, but you all have the presentation where you are. Okay. So I think we're ready. I will I will start. So perfect. So good afternoon. We will begin just reminding everyone of sort of the large profile of the district. We are the fourth largest district in Maryland. We are the 37th largest district in the United States. And to give you some context for that, there are at my last count over 13,000 school districts in this country. So as you can see, we are kind of a behemoth compared to most school districts. And obviously, you understand where we're located. You can see we have currently about 84,246 students, 56 students. You can see the breakdown of populations, 43.6% white, 22%, 22.7% African American, 22.5% Hispanic, two or more races, et cetera, smaller, smaller groups. You will often hear them referred to as free and reduced meals. They are not reduced, they're reduced priced. That is a significant population. And in this state, that population has continued to grow as it has across the country. And then multilingual learners at 10.6%. Here you can see uh very particularly some documentation on the Annapolis cluster enrollment. Uh many of you may recall we uh one of the many wonderful tasks this board charged Dr. Bedell with was uh redistricting of the entire county. And we didn't tell him that before we hired him. So I will tell you uh again, just so you know, Dr. Bedell joined us in 22. Uh we just completed renewing his contract for the next four years. Congratulations of all the terms. I was president of the board when we hired Dr. Biddell. I count that as one of the great um things that I've been able to do on this board. Um, and I should say he was hired unanimously and he was renewed unanimously. So the board is is very strong and firm and in support of everything that Dr.