With children back in school, many are receiving what may be the healthiest meals they get all week. But while New York State has worked to provide meals for students in school, educators are concerned about how food insecurity at home affects children when home for the weekend. A Buffalo-based not-for-profit has renewed a program set up to address it.
For several years, FeedMore WNY has provided healthy food kits which are sent home with elementary school students identified by their schools as being in need.
“We send them to those elementary schools that have asked for them, and they take the bags that are in the boxes and put them in the backpack of students who qualify every Friday,” said Collin Bishop, vice president of external affairs at FeedMore. “That way, the students who need that additional nutritional assistance have it on the weekends when they're at home.”
Bishop says the kits are placed in children’s backpacks discreetly, so that peers do not necessarily know that their classmates are recipients. It’s done, he explained, to preserve a child’s dignity.
The program serves schools in multiple districts, from as far north as Niagara County to as far south as Chautauqua and Cattaraugus Counties. In Buffalo, interim superintendent Dr. Ebony Prophet-Bullock is a strong supporter of the program.
“We talked about this at our administrative retreat. You can look around this room, and we are all the face of insecurity,” she said. “I myself have a story growing up where my mom, when she was a single mother, struggled to put food on our table.”
Prophet-Bullock says the Buffalo Public School District is committed to increasing its support of that program, and in its own work to feed the students each day.
“We are going to be bolstering up the program with our new commissary, who will also continue to help make sure that our food, our families, excuse me, have good, nutritious food,” she said.
FeedMore’s program is funded by multiple foundations and private donors who, Bishop says, see the value in providing these foods to the children.
“We know when kids come to school and they're well fed, it's much easier for them to learn,” he said. “It makes a difference not just over the weekends but during the school week when teachers are teaching kids who are well fed and they're able to learn better. A lot of people recognize that, and a lot of people support that that program annually.”
