Litchfield Elementary School District Plans for Summer Food in 2010

 

Okay, everyone cinch down your seatbelt and get a good grip, we are starting to plan for Summer 2010.  

 

 

Here are some numbers and info from last year and our tentative goals for 2010:

• Meals served in 2009 were 137,000   Meals to be served in 2010 – 250,000 (works out to be about 5K meals per day).
  • We intend to increase the number of dinner meal sites thru our partnership with St Mary’s Food Bank Alliance (SMFBA) and other neighboring school districts
  • We will increase our hot meal sites to three-five LESD schools based on current Free & Reduced %.
  • We talked with other districts last year about actually paying for using their schools and kitchens to provide hot meals but were not successful.  Can ask again for 2010.
  • We will expand our production sites to three LESD middle school sites which will also serve as pick up sites for bulk meals.
  • We have equipment currently to produce the 2010 meal goal with the exception of additional ice chests. Some of our partners may actually have this type of equipment we could use during summer. 
  • It is reasonable to expect that we could further partner with SMFBA and tap into their wonderful Community Kitchen program for assistance in the meal production area.
• Number of feeding sites in 2009 were 28 – Sites for 2010 to be 50
  • We actually had to turn away many requests last summer for feeding sites
  • We will add additional DES and WIC sites based on our success with similar sites in 2009
• Serving days for 2009 were 40.  Serving days for 2010 to be 50.
  • We are proposing Mon-Sat meals at many sites or if need is there we allowed to  go Mon-Sun
  • Program to start Monday after school lets out to Wed before school starts in fall.
• Partner with Glendale Elementary District to make sure we are covering additional areas of need to the north and east of current area
• Provide school bus transport to our hot meal sites for all three meals.  This can be funded as an expense by the Food Program
• Partner with YMCA or others to have an open gym around the meal times at the school sites.
  • This could be expanded to include the library and computer rooms.
  • This becomes a small issue due to supervision of the kids. I think the SFSP could count this as an expense we could fund but will have to check. We had parents volunteer to do this last year but district may require paid staff.
• Work with neighboring school districts currently providing SFSP and encourage them to adopt our serving model as far as meals per day (3) and program schedule length (50 days)
  • Last summer we actually picked up sites that other districts ran for a short period of time during the summer and were able to extend the feeding program till end of summer for a large number of children
• Start early with a coordinated effort of getting the word out thru ADE, AZDHS and DES. These folks have all been great to work with the last few years and am sure they will want to partner with us again in 2010
• As many of your know we have 80% of our feeding sites staffed by volunteers.
  • Last year we discovered opportunities that come up when working with volunteers. It will probably require that we formalize our volunteer program this summer and work with partners such as SMFBA on how to best utilize these wonderful volunteers in the most effective manner.
• We also have a large number of sites where these same volunteers picked up the ice chest at one of our schools and take to the feeding site.
  • This has been a great benefit to the program and we hope to continue the same for 2010.
  • We also have many sites that LESD delivers to each day that are staffed by volunteers and we expect to expand the number of sites we deliver to in 2010
• Last summer we had a large increase in the number of adult family members eating at our hot meal sites with their children.
  • We are exploring the possibility of perhaps local civic clubs (Kiwanis, Rotary) or churches picking up the nominal adult meal charge so that more families could participate.
  • This could be very helpful to the growing number of homeless families in our area. 

This may seem early to many of you to start planning for the summer of 2010 but we are actually probably a few months behind. As you can see we have lots of areas to review and make decisions on. We are not looking to reinvent the wheel but do want to smooth out the roadway as much as possible. If you know of anyone in our area that would like to be part of the SFSP 2010 send me their name or give them my number and ask them to call.

The success of our past Summer Programs is directly related to many of you thinking “outside of the box” and being creative. Arizona continues to lag as far as participation in the Summer Feeding Programs so let’s do our part to reduce Summer Hunger and keep all the children healthy thru the summer ready to come back to school eager to learn!

Thanks again for all your support in the past and we look forward to working with all of you again soon.  We welcome any comments and have very thick skin so do not hold back for fear of offending anyone!

David Schwake, RD, SNS
Food Director
Litchfield Elementary School District
Litchfield Park, AZ
schwake.d@lesd.k12.az.us
(623) 535-6056

Tagged as: child hunger az, end hunger, feed children, summer food