West Holmes teachers deliver the goods to area families

West Holmes teachers deliver the goods to area families
Dave Mast

West Holmes School District staff members put together food baskets with the food at each of the district schools and made sure that families enrolled in the free and reduced lunch program and many others had sustenance.

                        

With schools across Ohio getting canceled for at least several weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak, missing lessons and learning opportunities weren’t the only thing to go on hiatus as parents scrambled to reconfigure their lives to accommodate their children being home rather than in school.

With a great deal of perishable food apparently set to go to waste, West Holmes School District took action. Dawn Martin, director of food services for the district, was faced with the dilemma of what to do with all the food that was earmarked for the students over the coming days after schools shut down.

Martin and the district turned to the school staffs and found a way to deliver the goods, creating a makeshift food delivery system that allowed families to drive by each of the schools to pick up bags filled with food that helped many area families create meals for their children.

Martin said she connected with some of the administration and together they made the decision to make bags of food available for not just the families of students who receive free or reduced lunches in the district, but for anyone who might be in need of food during these troubling times.

The plan was to distribute the food at schools during Monday and Tuesday, March 16-17, but Martin said the response was not what they hoped. That spurred them to create an evening pick-up Wednesday, March 18 at the high school, asking staff members to volunteer to help distribute the food. The response from the staff was impressive and that was good because the amount of traffic they experienced during the evening effort was much greater.

“The response from the staff was incredible and they’ve been awesome,” Martin said. “We had a real outpouring of compassion and we even had teachers delivering food directly to the homes of people who could not get in to the school.”

Martin said that effort included door-to-door deliveries in trailer parks, where they delivered food to grateful families.

Martin said the idea behind the food distribution process was to make the meals reimbursable, meaning that the food met state guidelines on a nutritional level. Milk, apple sauce fruit cups, juices, cheese sticks, waffles, pancakes, yogurts, carrots, broccoli, lettuce and anything prepacked that might not last were built into the grab-and-go bags, and these bags were not just for a day’s worth of meals.

What we did was make a seven-day supply of food in the bags, so they received seven breakfasts and seven lunches,” Martin said. “We asked them how many children were in each family and that was how many bags we supplied each family with for the week.”

While the current plan is to return the week of March 30, that plan may or may not happen, so Martin said they are gearing up for another delivery day at that point.

“After that, we are just going to have to wait and see what happens,” Martin said. “We definitely have another pick-up period planned March 30-31.”

Martin said that while the former pick-ups occurred all over the district, they will probably make the high school the central pick-up location for the purpose of getting everything in one location and making it easier to distribute everything.

She added that they will probably have another evening pick-up added on Wednesday, April 1, because that seemed to accommodate families better. She added that this is also an opportunity for families to be a good neighbor.

“We’re trying to let people know that if they know of someone who needs food and can’t get in to come and pick it up for them,” Martin said. “We aren’t screening anyone or asking any questions. We just want to help families within our district.”

Martin said this endeavor shows how much the district cares for its kids and added that even the state of Ohio has gotten behind the idea of the ongoing effort to feed their students during this time.

“The state actually sent out an email to the school districts doing this, thanking them for their care and concern for the students and to share their gratitude for what we are doing,” Martin said. “I can’t thank our staff enough for all they have done to help our cooks out. We have an awesome team and I can’t thank them enough.”

In addition to the school food bags, they will also be working with The Food Pantry at the Church of God, which provides weekend bags of food for free and reduced lunch students in the district. The Food Pantry will be taking its brown bag backpack food items to add to the collection points.

“We will make sure they get their weekend bag in addition to what we are handing out,” Martin said. “We will get through this thing together.”


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