BIG TURNOUT AT HISD FOOD DROP
Food bank, rodeo help supply sites for students, families
Maria Gomez wheeled her grocery cart out of her East End home around sunrise Saturday morning. She hopped on the 50 Broadway bus, transferred to the 5 Southmore and arrived 90 minutes later at César E. Chavez High School in Allendale.
Gomez’s story was a familiar one for the hundreds of people who turned out for Houston ISD’s first food distribution event Saturday morning in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The district partnered with the Houston Food Bank to dole out packages of produce and meat to a line that stretched out of the high school’s parking lot and around the block.
For some, the fresh food will substitute for the school meals students no longer will receive now that HISD — along with most other school districts — has shut down through the end of March over concerns about the spread of the new coronavirus. All HISD schools provide students with three free meals a day through a federal program geared toward low-income areas, and at Chavez High School, 87 percent of students are “economically disadvantaged,” according to Texas Education Agency data.
Others, like Gomez, showed up Saturday over fears that their local grocery store or supermarket would run out of food, an especially difficult situation for those who rely on public transportation. Some were low on cash because they work commission-based jobs that have been hit hard by the pandemic.
“It’s well worth it, to be honest,” Gomez, 65, said of her three-hour roundtrip journey. “I already know what the deal is. It depends what they bring in the truck. You either get produce, you get fruits, you get pasta, sometimes they’ll even give you meat. It just depends what is available.”
Maria Camora showed up to Chavez High School Saturday with her 12-year-old daughter Melissa, who attends Stevenson Middle School nearby. Camora said she has had trouble finding basic goods at Walmart and Fiesta Mart, and work has been slow for her house-cleaning business during the pandemic.
“People are scared to have
“A lot of our families depend on school for breakfast, lunch and dinner.” Christyn McCloskey, Stevenson Middle School principal
somebody else come to their house,” she said.
Volunteers, most of whom were HISD employees, distributed the food like an assembly line. Sporting school apparel and disposable gloves, each person handed out a different item: potatoes, oranges, split peas, frozen egg products, broccoli, eggplant and more. The food bank rolled in at least three separate trucks throughout the three-hour event, each carrying different types of food.
Some of the food also came from the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, which donated leftover items after shutting down earlier this week over coronavirus concerns, according to HISD Interim Superintendent Grenita Lathan.
The large turnout prompted HISD to vastly expand the program for the coming week.
“After witnessing first-hand, the enormous need in the community at our first distribution site, it was clear that we needed to increase our efforts to help more families in partnership with the Houston Food Bank,” Lathan said in a prepared statement. “Our top priority right now is doing our part to ensure that our children are being fed during these unprecedented times, and I am thankful to all who are stepping up to serve families.”
HISD will have five distribution sites on Monday and Tuesday,
but then expand to at least 10 a day for the rest of the week.
On Friday, state Rep. Armando Walle, D-Houston, called on HISD to add sites at Sam Houston and Booker T. Washington high schools or their feeder schools. Both are located in north Houston without any nearby food distribution locations.
Lathan said HISD officials intended to use the Saturday event to gauge demand for the food distribution sites, though she did not say where the additional sites might be added.
“That was one of the reasons we were doing this single location today, to be able to assess what we needed to do over the course of the next several weeks,” she said. “Remember, we’re talking about two weeks now, but we don’t know what will happen in the next two weeks.”
Christyn McCloskey, the principal at Stevenson Middle School, was one of the volunteers handing out food Saturday morning. She showed up shortly before 9 a.m. and found the line wrapped around the entire block, which she said surprised her.
“Eighty percent of our district is economically disadvantaged, and it’s higher at my school specifically,” McCloskey said. “A lot of our families depend on school for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, to be able to provide this is amazing and really, really helping to serve the need.”