How agencies across N.C. are bridging the gap in child hunger
- Emily Weaver
- Feb 25, 2019
- 8 min read
From a “Yum Yum Bus” that delivers meals - to breakfast served in classrooms - to a hospital that caters to kids, agencies across the state are serving up fresh ideas to stave off hunger.
“Our goal is to make sure that there are no kids in North Carolina who are hungry,” Julie Pittman, a teacher at R-S Central High, told a large crowd in The Friday Center at the state’s 8th annual Child Hunger Leaders Conference in Chapel Hill Feb. 13.
Nearly 75 percent of the students in her Rutherford County Schools district qualify for free and reduced lunch. In the state, that number is more like three in five (nearly 900,000) students qualifying for lunch aid.
Pittman can relate. She grew up in a troubled home. She knew hunger at a young age and that hunger affected her abilities in the classroom.
“What my teacher did not know was that at 5 years old, I had witnessed my father try to murder my mother,” Pittman said. “She did not know that at 5 years old there were many nights ... that we did not have food because my mother was the sole provider in that house and was a public school teacher… She did not know that my body was broken, that my soul was broken and so she could not feed my mind.”
Then, Pittman met a teacher who made a difference. The teacher greeted her kids with love, snacks and the occasional lunch money for those who needed it.
“She understood that feeding the body meant that she could feed our minds and everyday she met us with an ‘I love you’ and that was feeding our soul,” said Pittman, who was named the 2018 Western NC Teacher of the Year. “Education is not about filling a pail. Education is about lighting a fire ... and there are fires all over this state.”
“From the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Kitty Hawk skyway” educational, business and policy leaders shared the work their agencies are doing to make sure “no kid goes hungry in our state.”
… Where Pittman teaches, she says the nutritionists go the extra mile to make sure they have breakfast ready for the kids who need it.
“They make early breakfast for kids who may be coming in to do activities before school,” Pittman said. “They make sure that we have breakfast in the classroom for some classes … because they know that there are some kids in advanced placement classes who need to eat early. They have breakfast after the bell because they know in high school there are kids who are not ready to eat at 7 o’clock in the morning, who may come to school late because it’s all they can do to get their three brothers and sisters up in the morning because their mom is still at work.”
And, at lunch, Pittman says they provide a “share table,” full of leftovers, where kids can grab extra food for later in the day.
“It is a shame to throw food away that doesn’t need to be thrown away, when there are stomachs that are still hungry,” she said.
In Craven County
... On the eastern shores of Swift Creek, 16 miles northwest of New Bern - where some children have to ride 90 minutes on the bus to get to school - food kiosks save the day.
“We put a schedule together that you can’t say no to,” said Tabari Wallace, principal at West Craven High.
Students are given 15 minutes to grab food from a kiosk between their first and second period classes at West Craven. With the additional break, worked into the schedule, 540 students are now eating the “most important meal of the day” on a daily basis. Eighty-three students only ate it when it was offered before school.
Kids, who earn good grades (75 and higher), are also rewarded with hour-long lunch breaks. The kids, who fall short, still get the standard 30 minutes for lunch, followed by 30 minutes of class remediation.
“A lot of kids, they’ve got it figured out,” Wallace said. “They just say, ‘I’m going to go and do this work right now so I can hang with the boys’ and they go do intramurals, they go outside and play cornhole … Now we use that basic need as a motivating factor at West Craven High School.”
Wallace was named the state’s Principal of the Year in 2018.
In Rowan-Salisbury Schools
… It’s not so much the wheels, but the meals on the bus that go round and round.
In the summer of 2016, the district’s first Yum Yum Bus delivered books, fresh produce and meals to kids and families in more than 130 sites throughout the county each day.
A year later, the bus had been outfitted with air conditioning and countertops to transform it into a summertime mobile cafe for kids. A second bus was added to the Yum Yum fleet last year.
Lisa Altmann, nutrition director at Rowan-Salisbury Schools, says they are now looking into the possibility of equipping the buses with technology and teacher aids to bring Internet and educational assistance in addition to food to the children who need it after school.
The district already offers meals and snacks to kids in 11 of of its 34 schools through the At-risk Afterschool Meal Program, funded by federal tax dollars.
At North Rowan High - where 70 percent of students get free or reduced lunches, Altmann said, they feed between 30 and 130 meals a day to students after school.
“It’s open to any student that’s on campus after school and I would encourage anybody that’s not doing it to do it,” she said.
The state’s At-risk Afterschool Meal Program aids districts in providing additional meals or snacks to students in after-school programs.
Mandy Cohen, secretary of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, says that 112 of the state’s 115 public school districts qualify for the program, but only 18 of them are using it.
“This is the kind of strategy we need to pursue statewide if we’re really going to make this work, There are resources right now available to do that,” Cohen said.
Most of the state’s districts that participate in the National School Lunch program already qualify for the after-school nutrition funds.
“Your tax dollars have paid for these programs, let’s use them,” said Tamara Baker, project and communications director with No Kid Hungry North Carolina.
To apply, contact Karla Wheeler at karla.wheeler@dpi.nc.gov
In Charlotte
… Atrium Health University City, became “the very first hospital in North Carolina (last year) to serve as a sponsor of summer meals and (as a) summer meals site,” Baker said.
The hospital offered 3,348 meals in the form of free breakfasts and lunches to any child, who came to Atrium, Monday through Friday for 11 weeks in the summer of 2018.
“They have professional chefs. They have kitchens and they’re already serving food and they have a lot of children who live in their communities,” Baker said. “We all thought it might just be the families of the patients, but it has become a community draw.”
Children came from 12 zip codes in the Mecklenburg County area to participate.
Throughout the summer Kids Eat Free program, community partners offered storytimes, books for summer reading, crafts, exercises, respect-building activities and safety lessons with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.
The kids, in turn, were offered a chance to pay-it-forward by making get well cards they hand-delivered to patients.
“It was an amazingly impactful opportunity for kids to come out of their shell,” said Elaine Jones, Atrium’s clinical nutrition manager.
Atrium was one of five agencies throughout the country to win the No Kid Hungry Campaign Distinguished National Summer Meals Hero Award.
In Durham
… A food city with a hunger problem, the town’s leadership is reaching across the table to serve up relief.
“Bon Appetit (magazine) called Durham ‘America’s foodiest small town’ and Southern Living named us the ‘tastiest town in the South.’ That’s awesome and well deserved,” said Durham Mayor Steve Schewel.
Having a smorgasbord of top restaurants makes him happy, he says, “but my happiness is deeply tempered by the fact that many people in Durham can’t afford to eat in most of those places. More than 20 percent of the children under the age of 18 in Durham are food insecure. That totals more than 12,000 children.”
Two-thirds of the town’s public school students are eligible to receive subsidized lunch. Twenty percent of Durhamites live in poverty. Most of them are people of color.
The city hosts 70 food pantries, mostly staffed by volunteers from local churches, and a legion of volunteers delivers Meals on Wheels to 450 homebound seniors five days a week, Schewel said. The Interfaith Food Shuttle provides food to thousands of people in the town every month. Bustling start-ups, farmers markets and even the city’s own solid waste department is striving to reduce food waste. But Schewel says he knows his town can do more.
“During the past six months we’ve begun that work in earnest. We’ve convened a group of 40 people: farmers, consumers, restaurateurs, food pantry managers, grass roots advocates to make a food security plan for Durham,” Schewel said. “We’ve taken the first few months of this process to look at Durham’s food system through a racial equity lens. We know that if we don’t put racial justice at the forefront of our work we will simply be repeating the mistakes that we’ve made in the past, replicating the same patterns of hunger and obesity that we see in our city now.”
Last year, Durham received a $125,000 CHAMPS Grant and 18-months of technical assistance to expand afterschool and summer meals programs in efforts to reduce food insecurity.
In Cumberland County
… 76.8 percent of students are on free or reduced lunch. The Cumberland County Schools district is using a grant obtained through the governor’s office to expand access to breakfast.
“You cannot nourish the mind until the body is nourished,” said Beth Maynard, CCS’ executive director of child nutrition services. She says she’s seen proof of that.
Cumberland County Schools was one of 12 districts across the state to receive the funding from No Kid Hungry and The Dairy Alliance to offer breakfast in the classroom in seven new schools.
Through the grant, kids who miss breakfast are allowed to eat it in their own seats after the start of the school day.
With the help of partners and funding, Maynard said her district was also able to add grab-and-go breakfast programs to two new schools. Under the grab-and-go model students are invited to pick up packaged breakfasts from mobile service carts as they head to class.
There was resistance to some of the programs, at first, Maynard said, until principals and teachers started noticing a reduction in absences and tardiness, calmer hallways in the morning and higher grades.
In Raleigh
… The Raleigh Police Department is working with its local food banks to offer meals to kids during camps throughout the summer.
“They help us to be able to provide a healthy breakfast and a healthy snack to our participants,” Sgt. Renae Lockhart, with RPD’s Youth Services Unit, told the crowd at the conference. “We have camps that we operate throughout the entire summer, which are free of charge,” and are offered with the help of many partners.
The camps are held in the community, utilizing spaces like the teaching kitchens at food banks, where officers show kids how to prepare healthy snacks for themselves. The camps not only help bridge a hunger gap, but also serve to foster a link between the youth and police.
Lockhart challenged other towns to reach out to local law enforcement in efforts to do the same.
In Rockingham County
… Breakfast and lunch are free to every student in many of the district’s schools thanks to the Community Eligibility Provision provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Tamara Baker, with No Kid Hungry N.C. “But to make sure students are accessing free breakfast, Breakfast After the Bell is a mandatory program in this county, in those community eligible schools.”
The Community Eligibility Provision is a non-pricing meal service option for schools and school districts in low-income areas, according to the USDA. The provision “allows the nation’s highest poverty schools and districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications.”
Schools are reimbursed “using a formula based on the percentage of students categorically eligible for free meals based on their participation in … programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).”
Central Elementary, which offers Breakfast After the Bell to every student, has marked high improvement in grades since the program began, according to Rockingham County Schools Superintendent Rodney Shotwell.
What can we do here in Western North Carolina to feed hungry children? Are you doing something? I’d love to hear from you. Email me at emweaver13@gmail.com
Comments