Not every student rejoices at the ringing of the last school bell of the year. For some students, summer vacation also means uncertainty and hunger, because they lose regular access to nutritious meals. These children are the focus of an annual summer lunch program sponsored by New Hanover County.
Summers can be hard on low-income families. The average family spends $316 more per month on food when school meals are not available, said Imer Smith, child nutrition director for New Hanover County Schools. Child care costs also may rise, putting a significant strain on a limited budget.
To address that need, the Seamless Summer nutrition program will operate for 24 days this year, or roughly six weeks, four days per week. Smith said the program served more than 38,000 meals over 27 days last year. The program runs Monday through Thursday; schools are closed on Fridays in the summer.
The need is there, Smith said.
“I’ve seen it,” she said. “We go out into the neighborhoods seeing children — for some, this is the only nutritious meal they will get. They wait for us on the curb.”
This year, the New Hanover County Schools will serve lunches Mondays through Thursdays beginning June 29 at 19 sites, and breakfast will be available at some of them — usually those where a summer activity program is being held. In addition, some community groups will have their own summer meals programs.
It costs $100,000 to run the program, most of it subsidized by the federal government. In some cases, lunch is served in conjunction with a summer activities program, but often children come by themselves to eat. No child 18 or younger is turned away.
While the schools are gearing up for a summer program, another local organization has been busy packing boxes of nonperishable foods for about 530 children in some of Wilmington’s neediest neighborhoods. NourishNC was begun in 2008 by Kim Carslake, a mother and Carolina Beach School volunteer who noticed that some children pleaded for additional food to take home with them.
The organization’s executive director, Beth Hollis, spent much of the last two weeks organizing volunteers who packed boxes full of food for the children in the program and their families. The two boxes each family receives should be good for about 10 weeks, Hollis said.
During the school year, the same children go home on Fridays with backpacks full of kid-friendly food, such as peanut butter and canned pasta — food they can fix themselves if necessary, as it often is, she said. The program operates in 25 schools.
“One in four children in our county is hungry,” Hollis said. “There are students who don’t want to get out of school in the summer because they don’t have things to eat. We are just trying to make them feel normal.”
NourishNC and Feast Down East co-sponsor a fresh produce program with the Blue Ribbon Commission and Virgo Middle School. Forty-five students get boxes of nonperishable food monthly, which their parents pick up or are delivered to avoid embarrassing the adolescents, as well as a bag of fresh produce with easy recipes for using the products sent home.
The program continues in the summertime and includes nutrition and cooking classes to help parents learn easy ways to prepare the food they receive.
Blue Ribbon Commission Director Jana Jones-Hollis, executive director of the Blue Ribbon Commission, has seen the hardships many children in Wilmington’s Youth Enrichment Zone — a section of the inner city that is the focus of the commission’s work — face, and not only because of hunger.
“You don’t ask our kids how their break was,” she said, because often the time they are out of school is filled with stress, uncertainty and worse.
For example, she said she took a student home just before spring break. The girl had forgotten school would be out the following week, and quickly went from talkative to silent. Hollis knew the family situation, and it wasn’t good. For that child, and many others, school is a refuge — the only security and stability they know.
Virgo is among a number of schools and community centers that offer summer programs designed not only to feed children and keep them engaged in activities, but also to help them retain what they learned the previous year. The average student loses about two months of learning over the summer, Jones-Hollis said.
Programs that fuel the body and the mind can help bridge that gap, she said.
Smith would agree. When possible, she encourages groups to come to the feeding sites to read to children and lead them in activities. But she does not lose site of the main purpose: feeding hungry children.
“It is desperately needed in the summertime,” Smith said.
To see a list of Seamless Summer sites, use this link to go to the New Hanover County Schools child nutrition page: http://bit.ly/1B4fysh
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