Beebe School District opens food pantry for area families
BEEBE — The dreams of several Beebe School District employees came true at the beginning of the school year when the Badger Family Pantry opened for business, distributing food to 41 hungry families in the school district.
“The main thing is that we don’t want hungry students in our schools,” said Mackie Sandlin, who took leadership with the food-pantry effort during its organization.
The idea for an on-campus food pantry came about after Superintendent Belinda Shook received a memo from the Arkansas Foodbank, which had done a pilot study in other school districts with on-campus food pantries. The Beebe School District already had breakfast in the classroom for all students at Badger and Beebe elementary schools and a backpack program through which certain students got food on the weekends, but that supply could not meet the needs of the students’ families.
In the lower grades, Beebe schools have about 60 percent of students on free and reduced-price lunches. According to Bread for the World, an organization aiming to end hunger, Arkansas had the highest percentage of hungry people in the nation last year and ranked fourth for the percentage of residents who are poor.
School district representatives met with Arkansas Foodbank employees during the 2013-14 school year, and at its March meeting, the Beebe Board of Education approved of the plan to establish the pantry.
The district started gathering food
for the pantry before graduation last year, and Sandlin said teachers were very generous with the food drives.
“We had our first food drive last spring,” she said. “We got a lot of food that drive. The teachers really got involved and showed their support.”
Three of the Beebe schools will hold food drives in the near future, and the district also gets food for the pantry from the Arkansas Foodbank.
Each month, students from the high school help to prepare boxes of food before the pantry opens. Students in three classes work as teams to make sure each box has food to help support a family, and they also deliver food to the school counselors, who identify specific needs outside of the times the pantry is open.
Sandlin said she was very happy with the turnout the first time the pantry was open, and she hopes the word is getting out so that donations will increase and more families in need will be able to participate.
Planned distribution dates for the Badger Family Pantry this school year are Oct. 15, Nov. 19, Dec. 17, Jan. 21, Feb. 18, March 18, April 15 and May 20. The pantry is open from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on those days in the first portable building on the right at the end of Badger Drive. There are no income or employment requirements, but families must have at least one student enrolled in a Beebe school to participate.