BATH — School lunch period is just winding down on Friday, and students around Maine are looking at the clock, waiting for the weekend.
Three more hours before they’re free to head home for a snack and begin their two days of freedom from school. Two carefree days to spend with friends, doing whatever they want.
At least, that’s what some students are thinking about.
But statistics show there are other students — about one in every four or five — who also are looking at the clock. Those students are realizing the hot lunch in front of them — “Can I have seconds by the way?” —may be the last nutritious meal they have until they return to school on Monday. There won’t be a snack when they get home. There may not even be supper later that night, or if there is, it likely won’t be healthy and filling enough to last.
Yes, for those 20 to 24 percent of Mid-coast students who are considered “food insecure” — which the U.S. Department of Agriculture defines as inconsistent access to adequate food — the end of school on Friday triggers feelings of worry. They face two days without healthy school meals. Two days to spend wondering whether they will be able to overcome their feelings of hunger to even be able to spend time with their friends.
The first group of students will arrive back at school Monday morning, rested and ready to learn. The latter group arrives hungry, rushing to the cafeteria if free breakfast is offered, and hoping it will be enough to help them concentrate in their classes until lunch time.
The two groups of students can be found in most schools, including those throughout the Mid-coast. When members of the United Methodist Church in Bath discovered that many food insecure students were attending Bath schools, they knew they needed to act.
Statewide, a startling 1-in-4 students were food insecure in 2012, according to the Feeding America network of food banks and hunger-ending agencies. But the statistics seem nearly unbelievable when Bath schools were examined individually.
The statistics are “shocking,” Cathy Leonard told the Bath Elementary Parent-Teacher Association during a presentation on Oct. 14. “Two in four kids are food insecure” in Bath schools. About 350 of the nearly 500 elementary students qualify for free or reduced lunch. (See chart on page 2.)
“We have to take care of our children,” said Leonard, chairwoman of Bath United Methodist Church’s Outreach and Mission Committee. “We met with prominent community members who were just as shocked as we were.” She added that many people are unaware just how much of a negative impact food insecurity has on children and their ability to learn.
“Students who come to school hungry can’t hear their teachers, they only hear their stomachs growling,” Ellen Beal told Dike-Newell School Principal Sally Brown earlier this year. Beal is Regional School Unit 1’s director of food services.
Brown explained in a letter to retired educator Irving Ouellette that more than 60 percent of her student body qualified for free or reduced lunch, prompting her to wonder, “what do they do on the weekends and during vacations?” If they do eat, it seemed “at the very least, they don’t have enough to eat.”
The kids make lots of trips to the nurse’s office with headaches and stomach aches, Brown wrote to Ouellette. “They don’t have the energy to concentrate or learn the social skills necessary to get along in the world. That’s even if they come to school.”
Ouellette, who lives in Brunswick, is a retired assistant superintendent for Bath and the former School Union 47 — which currently makes up RSU 1. He and others at his church were determined to enlist the community’s help to provide 45 children at Dike-Newell School with food on the weekends.
Through a partnership with Good Shepherd Food Bank in Auburn, and generous donors in the Bath area, at-risk students will discreetly be given food when they leave school each Friday, beginning in December.
The cost to cover one child each weekend during the school year is $225 through Good Shepherd’s BackPack Program, according to Laura Higgins, coordinator of the food agency’s Child Hunger Program.
To meet the goal of feeding 45 students from Dec. 1 through the rest of this school year, and the first semester of next school year, the group would need to raise more than $11,000.
To date, the group has solicited funds from foundations, community groups and private donors. But the need it still great to continue the program beyond 2015.
Ouellette told The Times Record in November that there are enough funds to feed 45 students in 2015.
“As we receive more donations we will secure the Bath BackPack Program at Dike-Newell for the 2015-16 school year and hopefully begin to offer the program at the Fisher-Mitchell School.”
He added that the group wants to be able to ensure the program is viable year after year, and that services can continue to be provided for children and families that will begin to be served at Dike-Newell.
“We need to institutionalize the Bath BackPack Program in the Bath community,” he added. “It’s a daunting task.”
Ultimately, he hopes the program can grow beyond the small group of church volunteers, and that a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization will step forward and assume leadership so that the program could be expanded to benefit needy children in all grades.
Similar program in local schools
Good Shepherd’s BackPack Program is currently available in 36 schools, including 11 in the Brunswick area, and Wiscasset. Each Tuesday, volunteers at Mid Coast Hunger Prevention Program unload pallets of food and fill bags according to a menu devised by Good Shepherd nutritionists.
On Oct. 14, a group from Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School in Brunswick was busy unloading and breaking down cases of food stuffs and packing 260 bags — assembly line style — for 260 students in 11 schools in School Administrative District 75, Lisbon, Brunswick and Durham.
MCHPP board member Jamie Tatham coordinates the volunteer effort each week, making sure volunteers know how many of each item to pack, and how many bags will be packed into each tote for delivery to schools.
“It takes $60,000 a year to feed 260 kids a week,” he said.
It’s a precise, streamlined process that MCHPP has perfected.
According to Karen Parker, executive director of MCHPP, Tatham helped start the program last year. “It went rather smoothly. Our board member who really took this on is very organized,” she said, adding Tatham has everything “down pat, making it a pretty easy process.”
Packing the bags is easy, in part, because there is a facility like the MCHPP building on Union Street. After hours, space is cleared, totes are brought out and tables are set up to hold items to be packed. Totes are set aside for volunteers who drive them to each school, where staff will discreetly distribute the bags to students they have predetermined to be most at-risk. None of the volunteer packers ever know which children will receive food.
That’s important when dealing with a potentially embarrassing stigma like hunger.
Funds for the Brunswick program are raised through grants, civic group fundraisers and individual donors. No public funds are used, Parker explained.
Bath BackPack Packers
For the Dike-Newell BackPack Program to be successful, volunteers packers are needed.
A Good Shepherd delivery truck will drop cases of food on pallets at the church once a month, where volunteers will need to take the items and fill the individual bags and then get them to the school for Friday distribution.
School staff will ensure that the bags are given to children — or placed in their backpacks while others are not around, for example — so that others will not know who is receiving the help.
Each bag will contain food for one family meal and a variety of snacks and easy-to-prepare items. For example, one weekend’s ration pack contains one package of whole wheat spaghetti, a can of chunky vegetable spaghetti sauce, four oatmeal pouches, two cans of tuna fish, two fruit cups and four fruit snack packs.
A second week includes a package each of brown rice, black beans and canned sweet peas, two fruit cups, four oatmeal pouches and four fruit snacks. A third includes chicken with stars soup, macaroni and cheese, fruit cups, tuna, raisins and canned corn. Shelf-stable milk is included each weekend.
Each ration pack is designed to include food for at least one full family meal, and additional items for the student. Sometimes additional materials may be included, such as cooking suggestions or tips on stretching the food budget.
How to help
Anyone wishing to donate to the program can send a check made payable to “Bath BackPack Program” to Good Shepherd Food Bank, P.O. Box 1807, Auburn, ME 04211-1807; or to Bath Savings Institution, 105 Front St., Bath, ME 04530.
Those who wish to volunteer as a packer can contact Brenda or Irving Ouellette at 802-673-2759 or 729-3089 or irvbren@gmail.com, or Sally Brown at sbrown2@rsu1.org. To learn more about Good Shepherd’s programs, contact Laura Higgins at 782-3554 or lhiggins@gsfb.org.
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