Boxes of Lunches

By Kiahna White-Alcain

June 12, 2020

In America, one in seven children struggle with hunger, not knowing where their next meal will come from. Nearly 100,000 schools serve lunches to 29.8 million students each day who rely on these meals to feed them. In Washington state alone, one in eight children under 18 years old live in poverty.

Now, statewide school closures prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have put the Bellingham School District on the front lines of figuring out how to keep kids from going hungry amidst a lockdown and rising unemployment.

On March 13, Gov. Jay Inslee announced the closure of all K-12 public and private schools in every district in the state of Washington starting March 17. Since then, Gov. Inslee has extended the order and all K-12 schools will remain closed through the end of the school year.

“We started planning what we were going to do if there was a school closure when things really started looking like it was inevitable,” said Patrick Durgan, executive chef and food service director for Bellingham Public Schools.

Bellingham School District spent the first two weeks of March coming up with a plan for the next few weeks, Durgan said. A lot of time went into deciding on a central location to prepare meals, while listening for updates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which sets standards for school lunches across the nation. On March 23, the district started providing daily meals through a drive-thru system, according to Bellingham School District’s Superintendent Greg Baker in a newsletter. On April 6, the district switched to multi-day meal boxes.

The district now provides the weekly meal boxes for families and community members in the district to pick up and take home. Weekly meal boxes can be collected from 10 different sites on Mondays from 11:00 a.m. until 12:30 p.m.

A typical meal box for one student consists of the makings for 14 meals, seven breakfasts and seven lunches, including items like cereal breakfast bars, canned soups, canned tuna, dried fruits, and boxes of mac & cheese.

Since the outbreak, many USDA restrictions regarding child nutrition programs have been lifted to accommodate social distancing measures. As of March 20, the agency waived meal service times, allowing the district to serve meals outside the standard times. This allowed students to take home meals. On March 25, the USDA dropped restrictions against parent pick-up and now a parent or guardian can pick up meals for their children without the student being present.

“We can have less people together as we’re building these boxes as opposed to dailies,” Durgan said about the decision between weekly meal boxes or daily meals. “We felt really strongly about keeping families from having to go every single day to site and getting out there in public.”

In a brand new high school cafeteria, open for barely a year, cardboard boxes are lined up in columns and rows, taking up the entire cafeteria floor. Sehome High School, which was recently remodeled, is a hub for sorting meal boxes and packing items.

“The families come and say, ‘We’ve got four kids,’ they get four boxes,” said Dana Smith, communications manager for Bellingham Public Schools.

All of the meal boxes are free, Durgan said. Each district gets reimbursed from the USDA for the amount of families and meals they serve, he said.

When it comes to the distribution sites for the boxes, there are only three to four people working at a time, Durgan said. Families have a 90-minute window to pick up their boxes to allow more time for social distancing as well, according to Durgan.

A father of three in the Bellingham School District said he liked the idea of weekly boxes because it limited the days he and his family have to leave the house and decreased their overall exposure. The father, who asked to remain anonymous, utilized the meal boxes early on due to personal hardships, but his family no longer participates in weekly pick-ups.

“Unfortunately, what we found was that the quality of the food in the boxes is pretty low, a lot of the food is processed,” he said, although he remains grateful for the district’s work to feed families in need.

While the father of three may not utilize the meal boxes anymore, he thinks the distribution process and system of receiving the boxes is done very well.

“We don’t see any problems with it, and we do feel safe,” he said. “I do like the way that they’re handling this part of the situation.”

While Sehome High School is the main site for creating the boxes, the meal boxes can be picked up at eight elementary schools throughout the district, along with one middle school and one high school.

Families can also pick up meal boxes from four different apartment complexes, a mobile park complex and a community center.

“The logistical puzzle of getting food out to folks in a time when we need to be social distancing is really interesting,” said Smith.

Bellingham Public Schools has received a lot of help from partnerships with local food banks as well.

“The Bellingham Food Bank has been an incredible partner to us,” said Jessica Sankey, executive director of operations for Bellingham Public Schools. “We’re packing boxes that are intended for one child and the food bank is focused more on households.”

The Bellingham Food Bank and Bellingham School District worked closely before the outbreak of COVID-19, said Michael Cohen, the executive director for the Bellingham Food Bank.

According to Cohen, they started to share resources as the district moved away from meals cooked from scratch. The Bellingham Food Bank has worked to connect the district with vendors of nonperishable foods.

Bellingham Food Bank’s way of doing things prior to COVID-19 has taken almost a 180-degree turn, Cohen said. The food bank used to operate like a small corner market where families could come in for necessities as they deemed fit, Cohen said. Due to the current circumstances, that’s no longer an option.

Similar to the school district, the food bank now gives out pre-packed, shelf-stable boxes and produce boxes at distribution sites around the community for families in need.

Since 2018, food insecurity in the U.S. increased by roughly 130% in households with children under 18 years old. In 2018 alone, 11.1% of households faced food insecurity at least some point during the year. In a survey released by the Census Bureau on May 20, 32% of the nearly 74,000 people surveyed reported they were getting enough food, but not the foods they need.

The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture announced that Washington state is approved to operate Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfers (EBT) as of May 26. This helps to provide assistance to families of children eligible for free or reduced lunches.

In the school newsletter put out on May 20, Baker announced that Bellingham Public Schools will continue to provide the meal boxes through the summer months.

After the pandemic, Sankey hopes people remember the collaborative work between local businesses and the school district to address food insecurity in the community. Both Sankey and Durgan want all kids and families to know about this service that the school is providing.

“We have the capacity to make more,” Sankey said. “We don’t ever want any kid to be hungry. This resource is available and as long as we’re meeting a need, we’ll keep doing it.”