4.1 Education

Maryland

Salisbury, Maryland provides the perfect environment to host creative and innovative education and learning. The 2018 education statistics for Salisbury show that 86.1% are high school graduates, 16.7% attend some college, and 28.1% are college graduates. Wicomico County, the county of which Salisbury is located in, had a graduation rate for 2018 of 83.22%. In 2018, Wor Wic Community College and Salisbury University awarded thirty degrees with many majors and minors centered around sustainability education.

There is great diversity among higher education in the city. Most students graduating from Wor Wic Community College and Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland are White (16 and 53.3%, respectively), followed by Black or African American (12 and 40%), Hispanic or Latino (1 and 3.33%), and Two or More Races (1 and 3.33%).

In the Maryland K-12 public school systems in 2013, minorities accounted for 59.1% of total student enrollment. On the Eastern Shore, where RCE Salisbury is to be located, Wicomico, Somerset, and Dorchester counties have school systems with minority students being the majority of the school (a.k.a. “minority-majority”.) Likewise, recent data shows that Somerset County, also on the Eastern Shore, ranks fifth in the state with 56.9% percent minority enrollment in public school systems. However, throughout the State of Maryland, minorities have higher dropout rates for grades 9-12. To examine this further, the percentage of dropout rate in 2017 for White students was 6.4%, African American was 12.4%, and the Hispanic dropout rate was 15.9%.
4.2 Economic

Maryland

The Eastern Shore began the twenty-first century with strong growth across multiple economic indicators. The region gained jobs at double the rate of the rest of the state from 2001 to 2007 while also outpacing the state in net business creation and keeping pace in wage growth. However, there are more people experiencing poverty now than there were 30 years ago. Maryland’s poverty rate is 19 percent higher than it was in 1990 – a year that the U.S. economy entered a recession – and there are nearly 200,000 more Marylanders trying to get by on incomes below the federal poverty line. Nearly every county in the state has a higher poverty rate than it had in 1990. While unemployment rates have continued to decline since the 2008 recession, wages often are not high enough to support a family.
4.3 Social

Maryland

The State of Maryland has an estimated population of 6,052,177 people based on the most recent US census calculations. When broken down into regional populations, the Eastern Shore of Maryland region includes the following nine counties: Cecil, Kent, Queen Anne’s, Talbot, Caroline, Dorchester, Wicomico, Worcester, and Somerset. See Table 6 for the population breakdowns. The sparse populated counties of the Eastern Shore of Maryland have a combined population of 454,889 or 13% of the state population.
4.4 Culture

The City of Salisbury, Maryland, was established as Handy’s Landing in 1732. At the time, it was a part of Somerset County, which was founded in 1666. Today, Salisbury is located in Wicomico County, which was officially founded in 1867. In 1870, the county appeared in the Maryland state census for the first time with a total of 15,000 residents. In 1922, Joint Resolution No. 21 in the Maryland General Assembly appointed a commission to investigate the need for establishing a Normal School on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The Commission assembled on July 28, 1922, and authorized a general construction loan which included a loan for “$117,000 for the purchase of land and the construction and equipment of a State Normal School to be located at Salisbury.” In 1925, the University was founded as a Normal School to produce teachers specifically with the intent of staffing the Maryland public school system and especially for those counties on the Eastern Shore that was, at the time, still isolated in the peninsula from the rest of the state. In 1935, the school became the Maryland Teachers’ College. Then in 1963, it became Salisbury State College. Another name change occurred in 1988 when the Maryland Higher Education Commission renamed it Salisbury State University, and finally, in 2001, it took on its current name of Salisbury University.
4.5 Environment

The Delmarva Peninsula and the Chesapeake Bay

The Delmarva Peninsula is the core region of the proposed RCE. It is a delicate ecosystem composed of two critical habitat types, wetlands and upland forest/farmland interfaces, with the Chesapeake Bay to the West and the Atlantic Ocean to the East. Due to the location, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia’s Eastern Shore counties have faced great changes in recent years. Virginia, for instance, has a chain of 14 barrier islands that up until 1933 had an abundance of pine forest and small villages; however, a major hurricane caused the destruction of the villages, submerged the pine forests, and eroded dunes. A combination of hurricanes, along with diseases, greatly affected sea life by killing off the seagrass where wildlife, such as shellfish, flourish. This is just one major example of the constant changes that occur in this fragile environment.