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Schools Help Hungry Kids During Weekends
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| Parent(s) |
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| Contributor | Gerald Farinas |
| Last Edited | Gerald Farinas Apr 14, 2004 04:48pm |
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| Category | News |
| Media | News Service - Associated Press |
| News Date | Wednesday, April 14, 2004 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Schools Help Hungry Kids During Weekends
The Honolulu Advertiser
On a recent Friday, about two dozen children went to the Noyes Elementary School office in what has become a weekly ritual at a growing number of schools: picking up backpacks of food so they won't go hungry over the weekend. The children don't like to talk about being hungry, said Joyce Starr, who runs the backpack program. So teachers rely on other clues. "One of the things that we notice is sometimes in the lunchroom, kids who eat their lunch real quick. They are hungry," Starr said. There are some children who are sorry when the weekend comes. "They say, 'I hate it because I've got to go home.' Or they get sick here at school and don't want to go home," Starr said. "So we kind of know that school is a safe place and they know we care about them and of course we try to feed them, too."
For poor students who eat most of their meals at school through government-subsidized breakfast and lunch programs, weekends and holidays can mean going hungry. So the St. Joseph School District, with the help of the local arm of America's Second Harvest, has started sending home backpacks filled with canned fruit, cereal bars and other single-serving foods. Similar programs serving thousands of children have started in more than a dozen other cities in the last few years. At Noyes Elementary, where two-thirds of the students get subsidized lunches, 10-year-old Mimi Ho was lugging home two backpacks to help feed her three siblings along with five cousins temporarily staying at her home. The fifth-grader said she eats some of the food and gives some of it away - particularly the applesauce, which she doesn't like. All the food is gone before Sunday. It's good to get the backpack of food, the girl said, but as is typical of children getting such help, she struggled when asked to elaborate. "It's sort of hard to explain?" she said and paused. "It's sort of really, really hard to explain?" |
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