Chapel Hill-Carrboro’s Food For Students program has served more than 1.3 million meals to local children since the pandemic began. While the food assistance program is set to change its distribution model ahead of the fall semester and in-person instruction, operations are still in full swing.
After schools initially closed on March 13, 2020, the expanded program, formerly known as Food For The Summer, has utilized USDA funds, private donations and community volunteer support to provide local students with meals every day.
After celebrating one million meals delivered in February and its one-year anniversary in March of this year, Food For Students is marching into the summer months with a flurry of food distribution events.
At a distribution event in June, Food For Students distributed more than 15,500 meals in one day. Liz Cartano, the Director of Dining for Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, said the need for food assistance has not let up, even after more than a year into the pandemic.
“We tallied up, and between our delivery sites, food going to every school, the Boys and Girls Club, Hargraves [Community Center], the Town of Chapel Hill, we are currently supporting over 50 programs with food,” Cartano said.
At its inception in March of 2020, Food For Students only had 20 food distribution sites serving meals five days a week. Soon after, to accommodate for the growing need amid lockdown, the program expanded to serving meals seven days a week at 37 sites.
This February, before some CHCCS students returned to the classroom under a hybrid learning model, Cartano said Food for Students grew to 48 distribution sites, utilizing the unused school buses to better reach every facet of the community.
Now, with some kids in summer school programs and others spending their summer vacation at home, the program is operating out of four district schools, providing seven-day meal boxes for pick-up every Wednesday in addition to the larger distribution events.
“So, families can go to one of those four sites and pick up meals as well as we are still delivering too, not with buses but with a volunteer network,” said Cartano.
That volunteer network delivers to an additional seven sites to reach those families who are not able to come in person to pick up their meals. Cartano said this week, they are serving 550 students.
After all the summers school programs end August 6, Food For Students is going to have one last large distribution event in early August.
“Anywhere between 13,000 and 14,000 meals will go out on August 11 and then August 23 school starts,” said Cartano.
Following the event on August 11, Cartano said Food For Students will once again adapt its model as students return to the classroom for the fall semester and free breakfasts and lunches are made available through the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently extended the Child Nutrition Program waiver to allow the nation’s public schools to serve free meals to all children through June 2022. Historically, free school meals are only offered to low-income students, however, after COVID-19 caused many schools to close for in-person instruction in 2020, the federal government opened the school meal program to all students.
Even when schools reopened for in-person classes this school year, the waiver for free meals remained in place.
“That is going to be a major shift in how food programs operate and from a multitude of lenses,” said Cartano. “School lunch is going to become the norm. School lunch could become cool if you do your menus right. School lunch could really start being a shift that helps with any equity issues that you have, because you’re now not going to have a cafe loaded with kids that are only free and reduced getting meals, where every kid can participate in your program for free.”
Food For Students will now be switching to North Carolina’s Seamless Summer Option, which allows the program to feed every student for free as long as they’re in school. It also provides flexibility to continue feeding students in the case of another “unplanned school closure” amid the pandemic.
Lead photo via Food For Students.
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