As she prepares for the beginning of the new school year, teacher Biz Logan is less worried about decorating her classroom and adapting her lesson plans to teach over video calls. She’s far more concerned about making sure her students have enough to eat.
With the decision to keep Concord schools fully remote in the fall, Logan and Dave Malay, both health teachers at Rundlett Middle School, will continue their work to keep students fed outside of the two meals the district provides each school day.
In addition, any family who was facing lunch debt carried over from the last school year will have it erased this year due to a recent donation to the district.
Logan and Malay founded the Blue Duke Care Closet at Rundlett in 2018 to address food insecurity among their students over weekends and vacations, when school meals were not provided. When COVID-19 forced schools to close in mid-March, the district was able to continue providing students with the meals they would have been getting at school.
Donna Reynolds, the district’s food service director, had to quickly adapt the system to meet the needs of children who were now at home.
Instead of transporting students to school, the district’s buses delivered meals to students along their regular routes. Students and their families were able to have food delivered at their normal stop along the bus route or have meals delivered directly to their homes. Reynolds estimates that the district served between 450 and 500 students each day, providing nearly 1,000 meals. “I really feel like we reached the students that needed it the most,” she said.
The district’s food service program ran through June 4, the official last day of school. That’s when the Community Action Program, which traditionally operates its Summer Food Service Program when school lunch programs end, took over meal distribution at various locations around Concord throughout the summer.
Logan and Malay wanted to supplement the district’s meal system on weekends and during the summer, especially considering that families were dealing with added health and economic stressors caused by the pandemic. To meet demand for the Care Closet program after schools closed, Logan and Malay coordinated with the New Hampshire Food Bank, assembling boxes with food from its mobile food pantry. However, when it was time for the next delivery two weeks later, the food bank was unavailable, so the two educators decided to do it themselves.
Over 100 volunteers have participated since the beginning of the pandemic, packing boxes in the Rundlett cafeteria. Malay estimates that each distribution contains 175 to 200 boxes of food, most of which are delivered directly to families.
“One of the biggest challenges was that a lot of these families don’t have access to food, but they also don’t have access to transportation,” Logan said. “Normally we’re sending food home with kids from school, so it was very easy. But the biggest challenge at the beginning was when we realized that people weren’t going to be able to come to the school to pick up their food.”
Malay has since coordinated with the district’s transportation system to bring the boxes directly to those who need them.
Throughout April and May, the number of students receiving food boxes grew, but as the re-opening of the economy has allowed more parents to return to work, Malay says the numbers began to dip slightly.
Once schools begin offering lunches in person again, Reynolds will have one less thing on her plate – dealing with the debts of students who owe the district money. Thanks to the generosity of a Concord family, all of the debt from the previous school year has been paid off in full.
Rob Fleischman, a Concord investor, was thinking about ways to make a charitable impact when he discovered what he calls a “doughnut hole” of need in the district’s food service program – while very low-income families were able to receive meals for free or at a heavily subsidized cost and families who could afford it paid costs in full, families in the middle struggled to keep up with costs.
Fleischman and his family donated $15,000, enough to cover most of the district’s debt left over from last school year. However, the donation came with a condition – Fleischman told the district he only wanted his name attached to the donation if the district created a way for others to follow what he and his family had done. “Sometimes when you do something generous, if you make a way for others to follow your generosity, it can multiply,” he said.
In response to Fleischman’s request, the district created a website where donations can be made to help alleviate the district’s lunch debt in the future.
For Reynolds, the donations couldn’t have come at a better time. “I don’t have the year-end numbers yet, but they’re not going to be pretty,” she said.
Whatever the new school year may bring, Fleischman hopes that this new wave of generosity can make things slightly easier.
“Times are hard for families, and COVID-19 has made it even worse,” he said. “In the fall, hopefully they go back to school, but even if they don’t, they won’t have to worry about a debt.”