January 31, 2025
The 2025 session of the Maryland General Assembly is in full swing! In the coming weeks, we’ll highlight a few of the bills we’re working on to promote economic justice and race equity. This month, we invite you to check out legislative priorities from our Human Right to Housing Project, Health and Benefits Equity Project, and Education Stability Project. Stay tuned for ways to take action! You can sign up for action alerts here.
Human Right to Housing
Health and Benefits Equity
Education Stability
Keeping individuals and families in their homes makes our communities safer and stronger. This year, we’ll be advocating with fellow members of Renters United Maryland and other advocates on several bills to ensure Marylanders can stay in their homes.
SB 651 / HB 709, Sponsors: Senator Anthony Muse and Delegate Jheanelle Wilkins
All Marylanders deserve the chance to put down roots in our communities, yet large corporate landlords file more than 5,000 eviction cases per year without providing a reason for the eviction. When corporate landlords engage in no-cause evictions, families cannot stay rooted in their schools, jobs, and support networks; and renters do not report unsafe conditions out of fear of eviction. The whole community suffers.
Passing Good Cause Eviction enabling legislation will allow local jurisdictions to pass their own Good Cause laws. Good Cause requires transparency and accountability from corporate landlords for why they are choosing to evict a tenant. It’s that simple. As Maryland’s budget deficit looms, passing enabling legislation for local Good Cause Eviction laws would save the state money on support programs and provide a no-cost way to prevent homelessness, strengthen our communities, and hold corporate landlords to account. Read more about Good Cause Eviction.
SB 442 / HB 767, Sponsors: Senator Charles Sydnor, III and Delegate Jennifer Terrasa
Evictions are not just a symptom of poverty; evictions cause poverty and homelessness – especially when families lose all their belongings. In Maryland, when tenants are evicted from their homes, they lose a roof over their heads, and many also lose their dignity and personal possessions. Financial records, family member’s ashes, and children’s keepsakes are all moved to the curb in a public, traumatic eviction process.
Right now, there is no state law to require that tenants receive notice of their eviction date, and no possession reclamation window. This is out of line with best practices in 46 other states. The Tenant Possessions Recovery Act (TPRA) will (1) require that tenants receive 14 days’ notice of their scheduled eviction, and (2) require that tenants have a ten-day window to reclaim their possessions before a landlord can dispose of them. The TPRA will provide more certainty for tenants and landlords, keep our streets clean and communities safe, and ensure tenants are treated with respect.
Right to Counsel Funding, $14-24m / year
SB 154 / HB 103, Sponsors: Senator Shelly Hettleman and Delegate Sandy Rosenberg
Right to Counsel funding ensures that no income-eligible tenant has to face an eviction judge alone. This program is proven to work. In FY24, attorneys closed nearly 9,200 cases – benefitting 21,000 Marylanders, including 9,100 kids. Of these cases, 88% of tenants who wished to remain in their homes were able to do so.
In the face of our budget crisis, Right to Counsel funding provides the state cost savings. The program provides a $3 return for every $1 invested, which resulted in a $46.7 million benefit in FY24 alone. These benefits come from reduced shelter costs, decreased public health expenditures, and improved housing stability.
Maintain Eviction Prevention Funding, $10m / year
In the state budget
Eviction Prevention Funds pay one to three months of past due rent for families facing a short-term crisis – ensuring a missed month’s rent doesn’t lead to homelessness. More than 5,000 families in Maryland are made homeless each year due to evictions. Eviction Prevention Funds can stop the devastating impact of homelessness on families and communities.
Similarly to Right to Counsel funding, Eviction Prevention Funds can also provide the state cost savings. For every dollar invested, Maryland would save an estimated $2.39 in costs by reducing the strain on state-funded safety nets. Eviction Prevention Funding provides stability, averts crisis, and prevents harm.
Sponsors: Del. Adrian Boafo and Sen. Shaneka Henson
Currently, landlords have the ability to deny housing to prospective tenants with a criminal record. The Maryland Fair Chance in Housing Act would ensure that prospective tenants have the ability to access safe and habitable housing without facing discriminatory practices based on their criminal record. The bill would limit the circumstances under which a landlord may reject a tenant’s application to lease for prior criminal history. We are advocating for this bill alongside B.U.I.L.D., Homeless Persons Representation Project, Life after Release, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Vera Institute of Justice.
Our communities are stronger when people have access to quality healthcare and to public benefits to make it through tough times. During this year’s legislative session, we’ll be advocating for policies to expand access to community health workers for low-income Marylanders and ensure that people with limited English proficiency have timely and consistent access to interpretation and translation in healthcare and state-run services and programs. We’ll also be supporting bills on medical debt protections, racial disparities in maternal healthcare, and access to public benefits programs.
Sponsor: Delegate Heather Bagnall
Community health workers (CHWs) are frontline public health workers who are trusted members of their communities and provide health-related education and information to patients. They address social determinants of health, like access to food, transportation, and housing, by helping patients navigate social services. To raise awareness of the importance of CHWs in advancing health equity, the PJC and fellow members of the Community Health Workers’ Empowerment Coalition of Maryland are advocating for the Governor to annually declare May 8 as Community Health Worker Appreciation Day. (May 8, 2018, is the date Community Health Worker certification was signed into law.)
Sponsor: Delegate Heather Bagnall
Community health worker positions are frequently supported by short-term funding, creating barriers to recruiting and retaining CHWs. To address this, we are advocating with fellow members of the Community Health Workers’ Empowerment Coalition of Maryland for a bill that would help create a more sustainable source of funding for CHWs by incentivizing hospitals to partner with community-based organizations that employ CHWs to improve health outcomes in communities within the hospital’s service area. Under federal law, non-profit hospitals must conduct a Community Health Needs Assessment every three years and invest financially in the health needs of the communities that they serve. This year’s bill would add a category of community benefit to that requirement, incentivizing hospitals to invest community benefit dollars into a formalized partnership with a community-based organization to develop a CHW workforce to provide services to hospital patients, including patients who do not qualify for Medicaid due to their immigration status, to improve health outcomes. The bill would set minimum requirements for what must be included in a Memorandum of Understanding between the hospital and community-based organization creating these programs, including a requirement to provide health insurance to uninsured CHWs if they request it.
Sponsor: Delegate Gabriel Acevero
When Marylanders with limited English proficiency (LEP) try to navigate state-run services, such as food and cash assistance benefits, they frequently encounter agencies and programs that do not provide legally required translation and interpretation. But there is no requirement for state agencies to have a language access plan on how they will meet the needs or LEP communities that they encounter. There is also no designated state entity charged with investigating and resolving these violations. And advocates are concerned that the new federal administration may strip federal language access protections. In response, we are collaborating with the Maryland Language Access Equity Alliance and other language access advocates to advance the Language Access Act of 2025, which would strengthen Maryland language access law and preserve important protections on the state level by:
The Health and Benefits Equity Project will also weigh in on bills that would:
Every child should have access to an education. But some school district disciplinary practices and state policies can keep kids from succeeding in school. In this year’s legislative session, we plan to advocate for bills to improve how the Maryland State Department of Education tracks and addresses disparities in school discipline, decriminalize disruption in school, ban the use of disciplinary records in college admissions, and lower the voting age for county Board of Education elections. We will also push back against legislation that would violate education rights by banning certain students from in-person school attendance.
HB 488, Sponsor: Del. Aaron Kaufman
Maryland schools’ use of exclusionary discipline does not fall evenly across student demographic groups. Our schools disproportionately suspend and expel Black and brown students even though there are no real differences in behavior from white students. And schools disproportionately discipline students with disabilities for disability-related behavior. But to fully address these and other disparities, changes are needed in how the Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) reports data and flags schools that need to fix discipline disproportionality problems. HB 488 would require MSDE to:
HB 627, Sponsor: Del. Sheila Ruth
We’re renewing the call for legislators to pass a bill that would ensure that children cannot be arrested for so-called disruptive behaviors in school. Currently, anyone, including students, may face up to six months in jail for “willfully disturb[ing] or otherwise willfully prevent[ing] the orderly conduct of the activities, administration, or classes” of a school. Md. Code Educ. Sec. 26-101(a). Because virtually any student misbehavior can be characterized as disrupting or disturbing school, police can and do use this statute to arrest students for run-of-the-mill horseplay, talking back, or roaming the hallways. During the 2022-23 school year, 858 children were charged with disrupting school activities, making this one of the most common and racially disparate juvenile charges. Because what constitutes “disruption” is undefined and subject to the influences of implicit bias, Black children are charged with disruption at four times the rate of white children even though there are fewer Black children than white children in Maryland. Under the proposed legislation, the criminal penalties for school disruption would no longer apply to students, so that students will no longer face arrest and other law enforcement consequences for relatively minor childhood or adolescent behaviors.
SB 151, Sponsor: Sen. Alonzo Washington
As described above, school discipline disproportionately harms Black and brown K-12 students as well as students with disabilities. SB 151 seeks to prevent those disparities from following a student as they apply for college, by prohibiting institutions of higher education from asking about an applicant’s disciplinary record during the admissions process.
HB 52, Sponsor: Del. Joe Vogel
HB 52 would lower the age to vote for members of an elected county board of education to 16, empowering young people to have a meaningful voice in the decisions that directly impact their education and futures. Students aged 16 and 17 experience the effects of policies set by school boards daily, from curriculum choices and extracurricular funding to decisions about mental health resources and school safety protocols. Studies also show that they possess the cognitive ability to make informed decisions comparable to older voters. Allowing these students to vote in school board elections recognizes their firsthand perspective and acknowledges their stake in these outcomes.
Every child deserves a classroom, not just a screen. But several bills in this year’s General Assembly would violate parents’ and children’s rights to a quality education. We are advocating against HB 68 and HB 137, which are blanket bans on in-person school attendance for students who are charged with or under investigation for a crime of violence. These bills would fail to make schools and communities safer, violate fundamental due process rights, put students at academic risk, and disproportionately harm Black students and students with disabilities.
We are also opposing SB 78, which would ban children convicted of certain sex offenses from in-person school attendance and expand the offenses that require children to register as a juvenile sex offender. Maryland law already provides robust safeguards to address school safety concerns while ensuring that children with disabilities are not unfairly and illegally deprived of their educational opportunities. SB 78 would be a step backwards, having detrimental impacts on children, violating students’ due process rights, and running afoul of the rights of students with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Lack of in-person school attendance can lead to the isolation of children, depriving them of crucial social interactions, support services, and academic progress. This isolation increases the risk of mental health concerns, hinders their overall development, and creates a stigma for the child regarding their inability to attend in-person school. Excluding children with disabilities from in-person schooling without individualized consideration of their needs and circumstances can have long-lasting detrimental effects on their educational outcomes, social integration, and overall well-being.
