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Romano: The hungriest children, and the longest weekends

 
Thank-you letters from elementary school kids enrolled in the Pack-A-Snack program that provides food for chronically hungry children on weekends.
Thank-you letters from elementary school kids enrolled in the Pack-A-Snack program that provides food for chronically hungry children on weekends.
Published May 10, 2016

The children are not tracked down through fiscal reports or bureaucratic calculations. They're not screened, and there are no complex qualifications that must be met.

Instead, teachers look for students who seem sluggish and slow on Monday mornings. Guidance counselors and administrators are also asked to watch for telltale signs.

And cafeteria workers are given the most disheartening assignments of all.

"We ask them to look for kids who rush to the front of the line," said Pinellas County schools social worker Jennifer Mazur. "Kids who might be going through the trash looking for food, or who are stuffing it in their pockets to bring home to siblings."

The simple — and devastating — goal is to find children in need. The students who might qualify for free lunch at school during the week, but who go without substantial meals every weekend. The children starving for nourishment right in front of us.

"To me, it's just unbelievable," said Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender Bob Dillinger. "That we even have to have a conversation in 2016 about hungry children is incredible. We just cannot have this."

Believe it or not, these are the early lines to what could be a happy story.

Or, at least, a hopeful story.

About a half-dozen years ago, Lewis Hill began a program through the United Methodist Cooperative Ministries to provide healthy food on the weekends for needy children at a nearby elementary school. Soon, Hill began talking to other churches, businesses and nonprofits about adopting elementary schools in their own neighborhoods.

The idea was to fill a backpack with 10 snack-sized items that children could access on their own throughout the weekend. It's meant to supplement a diet, but too often serves as a main source of food. The numbers vary from campus to campus, but high-poverty schools can have as many as 150 kids receiving a Pack-A-Snack every Friday afternoon.

"I had one little girl tell me it was the only thing she could count on to eat on the weekend," said Mazur, who started the program at two schools and is now the county coordinator. "It's something they can count on, something that's their very own.

"The kids would stop me in the hall during the week and tell me not to forget them on Friday."

The beauty of the program is in its simplicity. There are no background checks or financial statements to fill out. Funds for the snacks come not from government coffers, but from the community itself.

Mazur said some church congregations have since grown so attached to the schools, it has fostered a relationship beyond the weekend snacks. Some churches have expanded to provide mentoring and tutoring programs, as well as holiday meals.

When Dillinger heard about the program, he immediately began lining up businesses to provide food and funding through Nourish to Flourish, a subsidiary of the Beth Dillinger Foundation. Pack-A-Snack now has 36 providers feeding 4,000 children in 65 schools, with the Dillinger foundation responsible for about a quarter of the load.

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A similar program called Food 4 Kids was started in Hills­borough County through the Junior League and Feeding America.

"We're not going to fix this by going through Tallahassee or Washington, D.C.," Dillinger said. "This needs to be a community coming together to take care of itself. We need to let these kids know that there are people out there who care about them."

This isn't over. Not by a long shot.

But it's a necessary start, and a hopeful direction. It is, simultaneously, one of our greatest shames and some of our finest hours.