Oct 18, 2023

Today we have three fairly sad stories and then a happy one, so stick with us.

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Ike Morgan

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Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said truancy is so bad in the Magic City that he's ready to call the District Attorney on some parents.

AL.com's Greg Garrison reports that Woodfin spoke at a City Council meeting and said parents can face prosecution and even their subsidized public housing if they don't make sure their kids get to school.

“Truancy is illegal. We hold parents responsible for their 8- and 9-year-old child just not going to school.”

Woodfin said the problem is bad at all grade levels, but during the meeting he zeroed in on third grade, which has been identified by the state as a key age to have kids reading at grade level. The mayor said that in Birmingham, the third-grade truancy rate is well over 50 percent. Students are currently considered truant if they have seven or more unexcused absences.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reclassified seven Alabama endangered species as extinct, reports AL.com's Dennis Pillion.

That doesn't necessarily mean the species died out recently. Some of these critters haven't been seen in decades. But they're at the point now that the Wildlife Service figures they're almost certainly never going to show up again.

The species include a bird and six freshwater mussels and snails. They are:

It's not unheard of for labor-and-delivery units to close up shop in Alabama. For years we've seen them go away, often the victims of shrinking communities.

AL.com's Amy Yurkanin reports that three hospitals within a month will cut off care for pregnant women and newborn babies: Princeton Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham and Shelby Baptist Medical Center in Alabaster will stop delivering babies after Oct. 24, and Monroe County Hospital in Monroeville will stop its labor-and-delivery services Nov. 15.

In the case of Monroe County, you have a hospital in a fairly rural area that's about halfway between Mobile and Montgomery. Amy interviewed a Monroeville woman who's 25 weeks pregnant and hoped for an all-natural delivery, but she said she might end up with a planned induction or even a C-section because it'll now be at a unit an hour and a half away.

Alisha Bowen said, "I do not plan on having a baby on the side of I-65.”

A trip down to Campbellton, Florida, paid off for a Dothan man.

AL.com's Howard Koplowitz reports that Gary Thomas won the top prize in the Florida Lottery's "$150,000 A Year for Life" scratch-off game. The name of the game describes the top prize, but Thomas decided to take a one-time, lump-sum of $2.44 million.

If you do the math, Thomas is 49 years old so he would've been 66 years old when the total of the annual payments would've surpassed the lump-sum amount. After factoring in the real value of wealth over time, our analysis determined that he's a winner either way.

“So, well, I went out in the woods and I didn’t know where I was going. So I look around and there was a white-tail buck deer, a red-tail hawk sitting on a limb and a chubby old groundhog was all around me.

“So I said ‘God, thank you.’ I wrote it all down and they liked it."

Songwriter Ronnie Rogers, who wrote the iconic "Dixieland Delight" for the country band Alabama. AL.com's Michael Casagrande interviewed Rogers for a story on the background of the song and its place in Alabama football culture.

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