Backpack Buddies: Schools Send Home Food With Students
 

Possible service project. . .


Schools give food to hungry students

By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH
The Associated Press

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. - On a recent Friday, about two dozen children went to the Noyes Elementary School office in what has become a weekly ritual at a growing number of schools: picking up backpacks of food so they won't go hungry over the weekend.

The children don't like to talk about being hungry, said Joyce Starr, who runs the backpack program. So teachers rely on other clues.

"One of the things that we notice is sometimes in the lunchroom, kids who eat their lunch real quick. They are hungry," Starr said.


There are some children who are sorry when the weekend comes.

"They say, 'I hate it because I've got to go home.' Or they get sick here at school and don't want to go home," Starr said. "So we kind of know that school is a safe place and they know we care about them and of course we try to feed them, too."

For poor students who eat most of their meals at school through government-subsidized breakfast and lunch programs, weekends and holidays can mean going hungry.

So the St. Joseph School District, with the help of the local arm of America's Second Harvest, has started sending home backpacks filled with canned fruit, cereal bars and other single-serving foods. Similar programs serving thousands of children have started in more than a dozen other cities in the last few years.

At Noyes Elementary, where two-thirds of the students get subsidized lunches, 10-year-old Mimi Ho was lugging home two backpacks to help feed her three siblings along with five cousins temporarily staying at her home. The fifth-grader said she eats some of the food and gives some of it away - particularly the applesauce, which she doesn't like. All the food is gone before Sunday.

It's good to get the backpack of food, the girl said, but as is typical of children getting such help, she struggled when asked to elaborate.

Read the rest HERE.

http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com...bags_ny428.jpg
Mimi Ho smiles as she carries two backpacks filled with food from the office at Noyes Elementary School in St. Joseph, Mo., April 2, 2004. Ho is participating in the Backpack Buddies program, where needy students are provided backpacks full of food every Friday to get them through the weekend. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

I never understood why cafeteria mgrs would THROW away food...
 

I like this. Instead of throwing away food, give it to the kids on the weekends. Better than that, serve the kids AT school 2nds if they desire.


sidenote:In our school's cafeteria adults are given the SAME portion as students and they pay $3.00 for it...NOT ME!

My uncle cooked in a cafeteria and back in the day always snuck and brought home food-especially the big cans that hadn't been used. They had to always make sure there were no supplies left - if they didn't get rid of it they feared the Board of Ed would cut the budget and they wouldn't have $$ needed for the next year. But these men were too frugal (smart) to let it go to waste so they would take turns sneaking it out but the law was that they were suppossed to throw it out (people in other districts were fired for this).