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2nd Sesame Street Place park opening in San Diego

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By MIKE SCHNEIDER Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — There are plenty of sunny days to sweep the clouds away where SeaWorld is opening its next theme park.

Officials with SeaWorld Entertainment and Sesame Workshop announced Monday that they are opening the country’s second Sesame Place park in San Diego in spring 2021. The first Sesame Place theme park opened almost 40 years ago outside Philadelphia.

The announcement continues a pivot by Orlando-based SeaWorld away from live animal shows.

This undated artist rendering provided by PGAV Destinations shows a depiction of the new SeaWorld and Sesame Workshop theme park, which is scheduled to open in San Diego in 2021. The new 17-acre Sesame Place park will be adjacent to their Sea World San Diego location. (PGAV Destinations via AP)

The new 17-acre (6.5-hectare) Sesame Place will be located south of SeaWorld San Diego. The space is currently occupied by the water park, Aquatica San Diego, which will have its final season next year.

Monday’s announcement is part of an expanding partnership between SeaWorld and Sesame Street, which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year. SeaWorld’s Orlando park opened a Sesame Street section earlier this year. Officials wouldn’t disclose the cost of the park.

Steve Youngwood, president of media and education and chief operating officer of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, said the two brands have common objectives.

“We want to engage and educate families. We mutually respect each side’s expertise and we collaborate together to make it work,” Youngwood said.

SeaWorld announced the end of its breeding program in March 2016, after years of pressure from animal rights advocates and shifting public opinion about orcas being held in captivity.

The protests intensified after the release of the 2013 documentary “Blackfish,” which focused on the life of Tilikum, a killer whale responsible for killing a trainer when he dragged her into a pool in front of shocked visitors in 2010.

The company in the past year, though, has seen a reversal of fortune. Attendance was up 8.6% during the 2018 fiscal year, as was revenue. For the first half of this year, attendance was up 1.7%.

In the past year, SeaWorld also has been offering specialized services at its parks for visitors with autism, and Sesame Place San Diego will also offer those services.

The San Diego park will be slightly larger than the Sesame Street park outside Philadelphia. Construction will start in Aquatica’s offseason and resume after Aquatica closes for the season next year.

The park’s opening in San Diego will open the Sesame Street experience to the western U.S., as well as to visitors from south of the border, said Marilyn Hannes, president of SeaWorld San Diego.

Trump rule may mean 1 million kids lose automatic free lunch

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By CANDICE CHOI AP Food & Health Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly a million children could lose their automatic eligibility for free school lunches under a Trump administration proposal that would reduce the number of people who get food stamps.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has released an analysis that says as many as 982,000 children could be affected by the change. About half would have to pay a reduced price of 40 cents for school lunch and 30 cents for breakfast. Around 40,000 would need to pay the full price, which varies depending on the district.

(Ellen O’Nan/The Paducah Sun via AP)

The rest — 445,000 — would remain eligible for free meals, but their families would have to apply to qualify.

Children automatically qualify for free lunches if their families receive food stamps, but the Trump administration has proposed tightening eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which was once known as food stamps. The USDA is not proposing changes to the income rules for the program. It says it is addressing a loophole that gives eligibility to people who would not have otherwise qualified.

The agency said the vast majority of affected children would still be eligible for either free or reduced-price meals.

But Lisa Davis of the advocacy group No Kid Hungry said the application to qualify could be a barrier.

“We hear from schools all the time about the challenge they have with getting families to understand the paperwork or to get it back,” Davis said.

The National School Lunch Program serves roughly 30 million students, including about 20 million free meals daily. For those who don’t qualify for free or reduced price meals, the average price of lunch was $2.48 for elementary school students in the 2016-17 school year, according to the School Nutrition Association, which represents cafeteria employees and vendors.

The group says about three-quarters of school districts have students with unpaid meal charges.

The prevalence of school lunch debt shows even small amounts of money can add up over time and become a burden to struggling families, said Giridhar Mallya, senior policy officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Earlier this year, a Rhode Island district at the center of a controversy around “lunch shaming ” — singling out students who owe lunch money — said $12,000 of its $77,000 in unpaid meal charges were owed by children who qualified for free lunches. The district said the charges were incurred before the families’ applications were approved.

In details released late Monday, the USDA said its proposal could cut $90 million a year from the cost of its school lunch and breakfast programs, which last year was more than $18 billion. It noted the actual number of children who could lose automatic access to free lunch could be less, since some schools offer free lunches to all students regardless of their eligibility.

But those schools do so under a program that requires 40% of students to be eligible for free meals, and the rule change could mean some schools no longer meet that threshold, Mallya said.

The USDA released the details of its analysis after it was criticized for failing to report the impact its SNAP rule change could have on children’s access to free school meals. The agency has said the change is intended to make eligibility rules more consistent across the country, since states can grant people eligibility if they were enrolled in other assistance programs.

The USDA said it would reopen the public comment period on the rule for two weeks to allow feedback on the estimated impact to school meals.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Number of abortions in US falls to lowest level since 1973

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By DAVID CRARY AP National Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The number and rate of abortions across the United States have plunged to their lowest levels since the procedure became legal nationwide in 1973, according to new figures released Wednesday.

The report from the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, counted 862,000 abortions in the U.S. in 2017. That’s down from 926,000 tallied in the group’s previous report for 2014, and from just over 1 million counted for 2011.

FILE – In this May 21, 2019 file photo, August Mulvihill, of Norwalk, Iowa, center, holds a sign during a rally to protest recent abortion bans at the Statehouse in Des Moines, Iowa. A new report released Wednesday, Sept. 18, shows that the number and rate of abortions across the U.S. have plunged to their lowest levels since the procedure became legal nationwide in 1973. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)

Guttmacher is the only entity that strives to count all abortions in the U.S., making inquiries of individual providers. Federal data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention excludes California, Maryland and New Hampshire because those states don’t compile comprehensive abortion data for the CDC.

The new report illustrates that abortions are decreasing in all parts of the country — in Republican-controlled states seeking to restrict abortion access and in Democratic-run states protecting abortion rights. Between 2011 and 2017, abortion rates increased in only five states and the District of Columbia.

One reason for the decline in abortions is that fewer women are becoming pregnant. The Guttmacher Institute noted that the birth rate and the abortion rate declined during the years covered by the new report. A likely factor, the report said, is increased accessibility of contraception since 2011. The Affordable Care Act required most private health insurance plans to cover contraceptives without out-of-pocket costs.

According to the report, the 2017 abortion rate was 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44 — the lowest rate since the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. Following that ruling, the number of abortions in the U.S. rose steadily — peaking at 1.6 million in 1990 before starting a steady, still-continuing decline. The abortion rate is now less than half what is was in 1990.

Guttmacher noted that almost 400 state laws restricting abortion access were enacted between 2011 and 2017. But it said these laws were not the main force behind the overall decline in abortions. It said 57% of the nationwide decline occurred in the 18 states, plus the District of Columbia, that did not enact any new restrictions.

Michael New, an abortion opponent who teaches social research at Catholic University of America, said Guttmacher’s report understated the role played by anti-abortion activism in reducing the number of abortions. In 1981, he said, 54% of women with unintended pregnancies opted for abortion. That number fell to 42% by 2011.

“This shows that pro-life efforts to change public opinion, assist pregnant women, and pass protective laws are all having an impact,” New said in an email.

Between 2011 and 2017, the number of clinics providing abortion in the U.S. declined from 839 to 808, with significant regional disparities, the report said. The South had a decline of 50 clinics, including 25 in Texas, and the Midwest had a decline of 33 clinics, including nine each in Iowa, Michigan and Ohio. By contrast, the Northeast added 59 clinics, mostly in New Jersey and New York.

Over that period, the abortion rate dropped in Ohio by 27% and in Texas by 30%. But the rate dropped by similar amounts in states that protected abortion access, including California, Hawaii and New Hampshire.

Areas with the highest abortion rates in 2017 were the District of Columbia, New Jersey, New York, Maryland and Florida. Rates were lowest in Wyoming, South Dakota, Kentucky, Idaho and Missouri — many women from those five states go out of state to obtain abortions .

One significant trend documented in the report: People who have abortions are increasingly relying on medication rather than surgery. Medication abortion, making use of the so-called abortion pill, accounted for 39% of all abortions in 2017, up from 29% in 2014.

The report, which focuses on data from 2017, does not chronicle the flurry of sweeping abortion bans that were enacted earlier this year in several GOP-controlled states, including a near-total ban in Alabama and five bills that would ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, as early as six weeks into pregnancy. None of those bans has taken effect and their backers hope that litigation over the laws might eventually lead to a Supreme Court ruling weakening or overturning Roe v. Wade.

Guttmacher’s president, Dr. Herminia Palacio, said abortion restrictions, regardless of whether they lead to fewer abortions, “are coercive and cruel by design,” with disproportionate impact on low-income women.

However, the push for tougher restrictions continues. Just last week, Texas Right to Life and some allied groups urged Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to call a special session of the Legislature to “abolish every remaining elective abortion” in the state.

The report comes amid upheaval in the federal family planning program, known as Title X. About one in five family planning clinics have left the program, objecting to a Trump administration regulation that bars them from referring women for abortions. Title X clinics provide birth control and basic health services for low-income women.

“If your priority is to reduce abortions, one of the best things you can do is make sure that women have access to high-quality, affordable and effective methods of birth control,” said Alina Salganicoff, director of women’s health policy for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

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