FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Schools aim to feed students — including remote learners
In the spring, when COVID-19 restrictions shut down schools all over, school districts and nonprofits moved to help keep children fed no matter where they were, helped by the U.S. Department of Agriculture quickly relaxing its rules on who could get meals and who could distribute them.
Now that educators are gearing up again for classes to resume in the fall, officials across the Pittsburgh region are committed to keeping the kids fed, but — as with everything during the pandemic — complications are abundant and constantly changing.
The USDA has not yet extended its rule waivers to the 2020-21 school year, which worries school districts starting classes this week and next.
“We know these meals have been a lifeline for some of these kids,” Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank’s Karen Dreyer said.
Many schools are still plotting out their fall schedules. Some districts plan to use remote learning or hybrid models in which students are in school some days and learning from home on others. Others are starting off entirely online. The variations are wide and could continue to change in the event of a new spike in COVID-19 cases.
That added to the fact that a surge in unemployment means more families may need help to keep their children fed.
Laura Stephany, health policy coordinator for nonprofit Allies for Children, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in March that her
organization estimates 60% of children in Allegheny County qualified for free meals before the pandemic. Five months later, “it’s likely that that number has increased as families have lost income,” she said.
Early on in the pandemic, the agriculture department moved to allow schools to serve all children for free without having to meet eligibility rules. The agency also allowed food distribution outdoors and to parents. Non-school groups also were allowed to distribute meals.
Even without an extended waiver of those rules, there are ways to get help. Ms. Dreyer, who picked up a new title in the past few months as director of child nutrition programs for the food bank, focuses on working with local school districts, including those that qualify for the federal Community Eligibility Provision because the per-capita income qualifies all students for free lunches and breakfasts.
One district that’s newly serving free meals based on the community provision is Northgate, which serves Bellevue and Avalon residents. Classes start Aug. 31 with all students learning virtually, and families can order a week’s worth of free meals every Monday to be picked up on Wednesdays at one of two schools.
Ms. Dreyer encouraged more districts to apply because more will qualify due to COVID-19-caused unemployment. Without USDA waivers, families will have to apply and qualify for assistance, some students will have to pay for their meals, and schools will have to keep records.
“Certainly, fewer kids will get meals,” she said, particularly in rural areas where people may live far from schools.
Even in urban areas, families face transportation challenges. Some districts are making plans to operate without the waivers.
Food flexibility
National groups including No Kid Hungry are part of bipartisan efforts to get the USDA to extend the waivers to give states and schools flexibility. On Thursday, that case was made by several officials in the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf, including state Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding. Mr. Redding cited Feeding America statistics that show nearly 58% of school-age children now face food insecurity, up from 15% in 2018.
“Pennsylvania’s charitable food system stands at the ready” to help with other programs, too, he said.
Meanwhile, No Kid Hungry has started taking applications for grants — up to $650,000 in Pennsylvania — to help school food services adapt.
“It’s not a small feat what they’re being asked to do,” said Lisa Davis, senior vice president of No Kid Hungry, especially given that most food services are charged with being financially selfsustaining.
The state Department of Education administers the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program. It recently issued its own guidelines.
Per USDA guidelines, children from families with incomes at or below 130% of the poverty level and those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and food stamp benefits are eligible for free lunches. Children in families whose income is between 130% and 185% of the poverty level are eligible for reduced-price lunches.
The state education department noted that students must maintain 6 feet of distance and wear face coverings while moving about in cafeterias.
“The best option is to serve individual meals and have students eat in classrooms or other spaces as an alternative” — including outdoors, the agency says.
School officials are sharing ideas in forums such as the “School Foodservice Child Nutritionists a.k.a. Lunch ladies” Facebook group, which posted a recent story on foodservicedirector.com headlined: “3 school nutrition teams share their fall reopening plans.”
One is the Penn-Trafford School District, where students will eat in a cafeteria but with new social-distance stickers and sneeze guards and without toppings bars. Workers will place all items on trays. Food service director Meghan Cusack planned to hire more personnel to make it work.
“We work so hard to get [students] to come to the cafeteria and make it a fun environment, something they enjoy, so I wanted to keep it as normal as possible,” she said.
Pittsburgh, other schools
Pittsburgh Public Schools decided to go fully virtual for the first nine weeks of the school year. The district is offering grab-and-go meal pickups at more than 25 sites five days a week in two time slots: 7-9 a.m. for breakfast and lunch and 10 a.m.-1 p.m. to get those meals for the next day.
Meals are free for all students under the federal Community Eligibility Provision and can be picked up by kids, parents or guardians, according to Curtistine Walker, director of food services for Pittsburgh Public Schools.
“[O]ur job is feeding children, and that’s what we intend to do by any means necessary,” she said.
The North Hills School District, which will have online-only instruction until at least Oct. 2, also is offering grab-and-go breakfasts and lunches at five sites. Pickups are available between 9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. “on any school day with virtual instruction” to all students who preorder via a Google form. The meals are free only for students who were already eligible for free or reduced-price breakfasts and lunches. They’re $4 each for everyone else.
Both Ms. Walker and Lindsay Radzvin, North Hills director of food service, said the new style of meal distribution is more expensive because of increased costs associated with individually packaging food items, nutritional requirements of meals, and personal protective equipment for servers.
“You have to purchase specific cleaning and sanitation items that are approved by the health department, so we’re making sure that everything is safe,” Ms. Radzvin said.
The Baldwin-Whitehall School District — which is giving parents the option of choosing a hybrid or remote learning model for the fall semester — is still finalizing a plan, as is the Mt. Lebanon district, where all students will start learning remotely.
The Steel Valley School District is giving parents a choice. They can go to a facility two days a week and grab three breakfasts and three lunches on either Tuesday or Friday to cover their next three days of meals. Parents of remote learning-only students can arrange to either pick up those six meals two days a week or grab 10 at one time.
Hampton Township School District is starting off with a hybrid model that will have students in school two days a week. Its plan is to “send students home with pre-bagged meals to be eaten on the days that they will be learning remotely,” Superintendent Michael Loughead said in an email.
At Woodland Hills, Superintendent James P. Harris said the district will essentially pick up where it left off in the spring regarding meals when classes begin Monday.
“We’re going 100% virtual, so we’ll have meal pickup at our schools. Depending on how the building is configured, it’ll be a walk-up or a drive-up,” he said.
Mr. Harris said Woodland Hills will use its usual foodservice staff to provide breakfast and lunch for a few hundred students a day out of the district’s 3,300 kids.
“Over the summer, it varied depending on the day, but it was anywhere between 50 and 200 kids,” he said. “We usually do summer feeding anyway, so we were set up for it. We just started it a little earlier ... We had multiple sites and used some alternative sites, and it was pretty successful.”
The first day of school for students in Washington County’s Canon-McMillan School District is Thursday, and the district plans to use a hybrid education model. On days when students are in person for classes, district spokesperson Morgan Northy said, they’ll have meals as “normal” — meaning kids will eat at regularly scheduled times. Ms. Northy said meals will be provided for students doing remote learning, but the district was still finalizing the details.
Food in flux
Delcine Pugh, superintendent of Aliquippa School District in Beaver County, said via email that the district didn’t yet have anything in place to provide breakfast and lunch to its students, who will be learning from home for the first nine weeks of the school year.
That’s where a agency could broker relief.
Since the pandemic began, the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania has helped to solidify food security around the region. Spokesperson Cheyenne Tyler said the agency will continue to do that as needs are identified.
“We do have a strong infrastructure in place that’s been established so that we will be able to meet the needs of school districts,” she said. thirdparty potentially
“Because there’s so much uncertainty in these challenging times ... we’re not certain what the needs will be.”
Ms. Tyler said that through July the United Way has helped facilitate about 308,000 meals in the region through partnerships with the PNC Foundation and the Eat’n Park restaurant chain.
The United Way has also initiated a pilot program with Penn Hills School District that has been operating since April to deliver graband-go meals to school bus routes where students can come and get them, she said. The agency is looking to replicate the program in other Allegheny County communities, she said.
Ms. Stephany, at Allies for Children, said she has been heartened by creative thinking and collaboration that she has seen during the pandemic. But she believes there’s more that can be done federally to support school districts, which are overwhelmed with many other concerns in addition to meals.
“Everything is so fluid and changing, and the No. 1 thing I think schools are focusing on is educating the children in an effective matter.” she said. “All of these other logistical considerations are being worked out as we go.”