You Help Local Elementary Schools Feed Children In Need

A counselor helps a student in need select food at the A. Brian Merry Elementary School Market. The food pantry is part of Golden Harvest’s new focus in schools. Students can choose from shelves of nutritious food items and bring home food for the whole family.

In an empty room lined with cupboards at the end of a hallway in A. Brian Merry Elementary, school counselor Stephanie Mack gets to work. She opens hanging cupboards lined with macaroni and cheese, canned chicken and sliced peaches. She arranges cans of chicken noodles soup, jars of peanut butter and individually wrapped chocolate graham cracker snacks on the counter.

Mack sets a sign in sheet on a table in the center of the room and turns around in time to see the first students filing in. The School Market is open for business.

“We have had a partnership with Golden Harvest for three years now,” says Mack. “We had such great success with [the BackPack Program] … we decided to expand the effort with a food pantry.”

In its second year, A. Brian Merry Elementary’s pantry is part of Golden Harvest Food Bank’s new focus in schools. Instead of BackPacks of four child-sized nutritious meals handed out each Friday, some schools are experimenting with larger pantries that open once a week and are stocked with regular-sized cans and boxes of nonperishable food items.

Counselors and aides are ready to help students pick out and load food into their book bags and donated reusable bags. The students are guided around the room and encouraged to try new foods or to pick out their favorite flavor of juice.

Some of the market’s students are siblings; they will take home two or three bags of full-size food items. That’s partly why the school made the switch from the BackPack Program.

A student chooses food at the A. Brian Merry Elementary School Market.

“The idea was that the children bring home portions that can accommodate the entire family,” Mack says.

There are fewer students at the School Market today, but that won’t last long. Parents are still filling out and sending back permission slips, and soon about 50 students will visit the pantry each week.

As Mack and the other pantry aides hand children items off the top shelves and help tie bags closed, one thing is clear: The students are excited to be going home tonight with food they got to pick out themselves.

“In a lot of cases – though not all — this will probably be the only secure location that they will get a meal consistently,” Mack observes.

“We just want to make sure that … we are nurturing these children in their academics, their social lives, and, of course, we want to provide food.”

“We don’t want anyone hungry,” she says, as the last of today’s hungry kids head back to class. “Children can’t learn and grow if they aren’t being nourished.”